Working in Vodafone Engineering as a graduate
In September 2022, Vodafone Engineering welcomed Alex, Will and Tom into the Software Engineering team taking on the role of ‘Junior Software Engineer’. They joined to work on microservices supporting our website, portals and mobile applications across the business. They all graduated together at Birmingham University and joined Vodafone through the Digital Degree Apprenticeship Program.
Through their University courses the graduates became familiar with Java programming and the concept of microservices; the Vodafone working environment over the coming months will take this knowledge and experience to a new level. Vodafone gives the graduates an opportunity to contribute to a real world microservice implementation with demanding functional and non-functional requirements.
Vodafone has prepared a program that will allow the graduates to experience several teams over the coming months. This program is aimed to maximise their learning and growth potential efficiently. They will spend longer with their initial team to maximise development opportunities before moving onto subsequent teams. Each team/project will provide a different perspective to learn and grow, ranging from the architecture, programming language and the ways of working.
Now that the graduates have been working with their initial Software Engineering teams for just over two months; we have caught up with them to hear their perspective on life at Vodafone.
Alex
In September I joined the Nordions Backend team; I’ve found everyone very welcoming and friendly during my first few months. I have been encouraged to ask questions (especially if there’s something I don’t understand) and my input in ceremonies has been gratefully received even though i’ve just joined the team.
Initially I started working on a User Story to improve an internal process, I was paired with another developer in the team, this has given me a great opportunity to learn the Ways Of Working without the initial pressure. I then progressed by independently working on a more challenging User Story [to upgrade Spring dependencies on one of the Services] and released this work to production — which was a fantastic experience. I’m now continuing to develop and release other services with respect to a similar technical upgrade.
I’ve really enjoyed my first few months and learn’t loads about development practices in the real world. Initially microservice based architecture felt overwhelming having no idea how all the services would interact and now I am getting the hang of things I can see the benefits it provides in terms of resiliency, performance and ease of mitigating technical debt. The AWS technical stack is new to me and I’m looking forward to learning more about these technologies.
Will
I’ve joined on the Digital Degree Apprenticeship program into the Lions Askari Team. The team is a backend team and works on developing the services, endpoints and APIs handling customers’ subscription details and products associated with them.
The team has been very friendly and patient with helping and supporting me in getting setup. This is echoed in Vodafone as a whole, whenever I post a question to Slack I will get a reply promptly from all levels of Digital.
Being a Vodafone developer has been a fun challenge — having to learn someone else’s complex codebase for the first time ever has been interesting. A completely different experience to University where most of the code I worked on was a simple file or a codebase I built from scratch.
I’ve already learnt a lot — mostly about being a better developer. I’ve been working on writing unit tests, something I rarely did at university. Furthermore I’ve learnt so much about all the additional modules of Java and what they can do to make creating a project so much easier. I’m looking forward to learning about all the supporting tools we use with our code such as AWS.
Tom
I’m Tom and I have been placed with DX IDM. Our team manage the login experience across the website to save each team producing and maintaining their own login implementation whilst ensuring a consistent journey.
The team have been very welcoming and supportive. Where my knowledge is lacking, I have been provided with plenty of materials to help me get up to speed which has really helped with bridging the gap between university and the world of work.
University was great for understanding a wide range of material but now I am looking forward to diving further into each area and building my knowledge with each team I work with. Another area that has been a learning curve is the sheer amount of code in the repository compared to my now meagre looking projects at university! That being said, working with a vast code base and a number of active developers is improving my teamwork and coding skills.
The key thing I have learnt so far is that everyone makes mistakes. It’s a comforting thought that has helped me to really get stuck in. Without the support available my progress would have been stifled so it is nice to see colleagues coming together to resolve and learn from problems.
Although I have only just begun working as a backend developer at Vodafone, I have had placements here throughout university. I’m excited to visit the office a little more to catchup with old colleagues and to meet new people!
The graduates all feel they have been kindly welcomed into both their individual Software Engineering team and the wider Vodafone Digital team. This is just the start of an exciting journey for these graduates and the many other new starters we are welcoming into Software Engineering every week.
We are constantly recruiting people across the full spectrum of Software Engineering roles (feel free to get in-touch via our website if you are looking to make you next move).
A great success story worth sharing that demonstrates just how good it is at Vodafone for so many of our Software Engineering teams.
