Joining the Graduate Engineer Programme at Credera: What to expect
The aim of this article is to provide readers with an overview of what to expect when applying for the Engineer Programme at Credera.
When I first applied for the Graduate Engineering Programme with Credera, I experienced a smooth interview and onboarding process. This was followed by a packed three-month training period, including two months of training and just under one month of GCP ACE exam study. Now, I am focused on internal work before I start work on client projects.
Personal background
I joined Credera UK in October 2021 as a Graduate Engineer. Alongside five other graduates in my group (another group of six graduates had previously started in September), we completed the three-month training period, and we are now in the process of being assigned to client projects.
In 2022, Credera UK has plans to hire more graduate engineers and graduate consultants — click here to find out more.
Interview and onboarding
19 December: I discovered the job listing on LinkedIn and applied on the same day. I later added Credera UK (formerly known as DMW Group) to the list of around 40 companies that I had previously applied to join.
22 December: I completed a 45-minute automated online coding test.
20 January: I attended a two-hour online interview with two engineers from within Credera. The first half of the interview involved talking through my code submission for the coding test and explaining some code concepts. The latter half was made up of a Q&A session and some common entry-level software engineer interview questions. One such example included ‘Name some benefits of serverless functions over traditional technologies.’
4 March: I received my offer to join Credera!
During this stage of the process, I received regular contact from a member of Credera’s recruitment team who gave me an introduction to the company and to the graduate programme. I was also kept informed on my progress and any next steps. My own contact — Recruitment Manager, Safwaan — did an amazing job. Not only did he make the recruitment process very clear, but he also made sure that I was notified of the results of the tests and interviews as soon as possible.
September: I received my company laptop — a MacBook Pro 2021 16-inch — and relevant accessories and was all set to begin the new journey.
The three-month training period
The structure of the graduate programme is very straightforward. You are given three months of training before you start work on client projects, and a year on from your start date, you officially graduate from the programme.
Training consists of two parts — the training itself and, for the last several weeks, preparing for the Google Cloud Platform Associate Cloud Engineer exam. For me, the training reminded me of my time in high school, where I learned a lot in a short space of time together with my friends. Throughout these three months, I was regularly in touch with my appraiser, Matt Ball, and the graduate programme mentors — namely James Jeffrey and Matt Toczek — who took good care of us and made sure that we were happy.
4 October: Day one consisted of onboarding. The day started with an office tour hosted by our lovely Office Manager, James Ball. After the tour, we received inductions from Credera’s IT, HR, and Finance teams, as well as an introduction to information security.
5 October - 29 November: The remainder of October and November were filled with training sessions, with the first two months predominantly consisting of 1/2-day training sessions. As a new graduate, there are a lot of tools and techniques used in the industry that you may not necessarily be familiar with, so the purpose of these training sessions is to better equip you for client work. Some examples of these training sessions included:
- “Agile and Business Analysis”, “Consulting” (Learning how to solve problems using the Agile approach, what business analysts and consultants do, and how we work together as a team);
- “Test-driven Programming”;
- “APIs with FastAPI”;
- “Object-Oriented Programming with Java”;
- “Terraform”;
- “CI/CD with GitHub Actions”;
- “Kotlin”;
- “Front End Development with ReactJS”;
- “Hackathon”;
- “GCP / Azure”;
- “Serverless Functions”;
- “Lightning Talks” (giving a five-minute presentation in an effort to improve your presentation skills);
- “Web Architecture with AWS Amplify” (Taking a look at how a real-life web application might be structured behind the scenes)
Within these two months, we also spent around two weeks working on a group project. Our team of six was divided into three teams: front-end, back-end, and infrastructure, and we created a very basic mentor-mentee matching website using ReactJS, Spring Boot, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and GCP resources.
1 December - 21 December: This time mostly consisted of self-study for the GCP ACE exam. Although this felt intimidating to begin with (especially seeing that the official recommendation by Google is to take this exam after having several months of experience with GCP), all six of us managed to pass!
22 December: This was our final wrap-up day. The last retro was held, and we gave feedback and comments on different aspects of the programme.
Joining a client project
At the start of the year, we started to be assigned to client projects. Before this took place, we were put on “the bench” (a conceptual space where all engineers who are not on a client project gather), and began work on internal projects with other engineers.
The experience so far
In my own experience, the graduate programme was fantastic — both in terms of the content delivered and the people teaching and supporting us. With other graduates learning together, the past three months have flown by in what seemed like a matter of weeks. I’ll soon be starting work on client projects and look forward to contributing to real-life projects in the months to come.
Interested in joining us?
Credera is now accepting applications for Graduate Engineer and Consultant positions in Summer 2022! Check out our open positions here and apply today.
Got a question?
Please get in touch to speak to a member of our team.
