How the programme works
From your first day to demonstrable engineering skills.
Discover, Learn, Build, Collaborate, Deploy and Demonstrate: a structured journey through the way professional engineering teams work.
The trainee journey
Six steps from joining the programme to demonstrating your skills.
Each step builds on the last, so participants move steadily from understanding how engineering teams work to delivering and presenting work of their own.
- 1
Discover
Get to know the programme, your pathway and how a professional engineering team operates.
- Meet your team and understand the roles within it
- Set up the tools you will use, such as GitHub and Jira
- Learn how work is planned, tracked and reviewed
- 2
Learn
Build the foundations for your pathway through guided, hands-on practice.
- Work through practical exercises for your chosen specialisation
- Practise source control, branching and pull requests
- Learn the engineering standards the team follows
- 3
Build
Take on realistic engineering tasks, from understanding requirements to writing working code.
- Pick up tickets from a sprint backlog
- Turn requirements into designs and working features
- Write automated tests alongside your code
- 4
Collaborate
Work as part of a team using the ceremonies and habits of professional engineering organisations.
- Take part in sprint planning, stand-ups and retrospectives
- Review colleagues' code and respond to feedback on your own
- Communicate progress and blockers to the team
- 5
Deploy
Release work through automated pipelines to the cloud and keep an eye on it in production.
- Use CI/CD pipelines to test and deploy changes
- Deploy to cloud environments
- Monitor what you release and respond to issues
- 6
Demonstrate
Present what you have built and assemble a portfolio that shows what you can do.
- Demo your work to the team and stakeholders
- Document your technical decisions
- Build a portfolio from your repositories and project work
Programme stages
Progress through three stages as your skills grow.
Participants start at the stage that matches their skills and goals, then take on more complex work and greater responsibility as they progress.
Stage 1
Foundation
Learn the basics of the engineering environment, set up your tools and complete simple, well-defined tasks.
- Tool setup and ways of working
- Guided tasks
- Core concepts for your pathway
Stage 2
Core
Work on larger pieces of the project and take on more responsibility within the team.
- Larger features and modules
- More independent delivery
- Deeper pathway skills
Stage 3
Advanced
Work much as you would in a real engineering role, with greater autonomy, delivering solutions ready for review.
- Near-real job responsibilities
- Independent problem solving
- Review-ready solutions
The working environment
The tools and practices of a professional engineering team.
GitHub
Source control, branching, pull requests and code reviews.
Jira
Backlogs, sprints and tracking work from idea to done.
CI/CD pipelines
Automated testing and deployment for every change.
Cloud platforms
Deploying, running and monitoring applications.
Agile ceremonies
Sprint planning, stand-ups, reviews and retrospectives.
Documentation
Requirements, architecture decisions and runbooks.
Ready to experience working in technology?
Tell us about yourself and the pathway you are interested in. We'll be in touch about the next steps.