Forging juniors at Elements Part IV
Written by Serena Della Pina and Ralph Lamballais Tessensohn
At Elements we are eager to find the best talent. In order to find people with the skill sets we are looking for, we decided to launch our own, in-house, junior developer training program, a.k.a. the Elements Academy. Under the wings of our Senior developers, two junior developers are initiated in the wonderful world of Python and Django and follow a six-month training program. Recently, colleagues Serena and Ralph completed the program and they were asked to describe their experiences in a short blog post.
Serena
When I finished my Master in Molecular Biology I never thought I would be in touch with a computer, beside to prepare my lab presentations. But after ten years in life science, I am now describing myself as a developer. In the last two years of my post-doc I started to learn Python a bit for fun and a bit because bioinformatics was taking over research and it was handy to have some informatics skills.
After looking for a while for online courses and possible trainings, I discovered that a nice company called Elements Interactive organises a junior Python training, so I applied for the position. The process was really fast and after a short time I decided to change completely my career and start a new adventure. Looking back at the six months of training I am amazed by the amount of new things I have learned and how I became competent in Python and Django. I’m grateful to all the nice people I have around me that took the time to help me.
Ralph
My take on the Elements Interactive Junior Python Program? A trove of technical information and professional experience packed neatly in a six-month training period focused on the level and pace of the trainee. During the program, a fundamental understanding of the language itself is established alongside a solid grasp of development methodologies, programming paradigms and a couple of scoops of the Django and pytest frameworks.
Speaking from my own experience (and the sharing of past experiences of the other former trainees) I feel I can say that Elements has proven to not only be capable of providing a solid training program; but to excel at it.
Originally published at www.elements.nl on January 24, 2018.
