Software Engineer Review

I’m a software engineer working in an agile team of around a dozen people. My working days start with a daily stand-up meeting where we discuss what we did yesterday, what we’ll be doing today, and any blockers we might have. I then spend most of my days writing production code for whatever project I’m working on at the time. So far in my 2 years here I’ve worked on 3 projects, and I’m about to start a fourth.

The course can be poorly structured at times. For the most part things are well planned out, but where change is needed (e.g. in recent times with covid bringing remote learning) the bureaucracy involved with the company collaborating with the university starts to show. Having said this though they do seem to have listened to feedback and made changes accordingly for the year below us and the university in particular gives ample opportunity to give feedback, with surveys circulated after every module.

The feeling I get from my friends in my year is that support can vary as it usually comes from your team and line manager. Personally though my team has been incredibly supportive, and are always happy for me to take time out of work to work on university work where I have deadlines coming up. My line manager in particular is often interested to know what I am studying and takes a genuine interest in my course.

I’ve found that lecturers often go beyond their role to offer support. While there are some lecturers I feel are more suited to my learning style than others, they all feel like they want us to succeed and are usually prompt in replying to emails and Teams messages, even on evenings and weekends.

Training from the University does often feel a little disconnected from my work for the company. This is in part due to the wide variety of roles undertaken by the apprentices who all work in different areas of the business in different sized teams with different responsibilities. The way I see it is I get a wide knowledge base from the University in both technical and management skills, and then I learn develop a subset of those skills beyond how the course teaches as part of my job where I am particularly specialised in code development.

Yes

It's a good company with a variety of opportunities in different areas that are opening up as the automotive industry is going through a period of rapid change. It also has a genuine interest in you doing well as it wants you to be their managers in the future as it aims to become a more technology-focussed company.