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Engineering Foundation
Introduction
The BJSS Academy is our Early Careers pathway into technology, business consulting, and user research and design roles. On the programme you’ll be helping our clients conceive, design, build, and support business solutions for the digital age.
The BJSS Engineering Academy is a full-time, paid employment that will develop your skills over 12 months with an up-front training period of five weeks comprising hands-on experience of things like cloud computing, software engineering, platform, testing, Agility, architecture, UI, API, databases and more.
After this we’ll have dedicated off-project learning time to focus on some key skills like design patterns, code smells, and refactoring techniques that will get you ready to hit the ground running.
What are the entry criteria?
There are no formal entry criteria for the BJSS Academy for our Engineering Foundation course. What we are looking for is passion and potential, although we do expect people to have some basic programming skills in any language, and be able to use simple logic to solve problems – think “if” statements, loops, and basic string manipulation.
What’s different about the BJSS scheme?
Well, firstly you join as an employee from day one. We don’t operate a “golden handcuffs” policy where you must pay back an amount of money for your training if you leave inside some arbitrary period. We believe people do their best work when they are trusted and empowered – so that’s exactly what we’ll give you.
As an employee, you’ll be subject to the same probation period of six months as everyone else, and get annual reviews and remuneration updates.
Where will I be based?
We have offices all over the world, and when you apply, we will ask you which office you are interested in joining. Whilst we can’t say exactly how each day will look, most of our clients work in a hybrid fashion, meaning a mixture of remote, online meetings and in office collaboration. Many clients are local to the office you will be joining.
What will I learn?
We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we won’t be teaching you a specific language or framework on this course – we’ll be using multiple different languages on different days. However, by the end you’ll have had practical experience of:
- Deploying static websites to AWS and creating Lambdas.
- The principles of Agile, teamwork, and presentation skills.
- Integrating Azure cognitive services.
- How to build, test, and deploy using things like Terraform and ARM templates.
- Designing, building, and deploying a three-tier web application to the cloud.
- Test-driven development.
What does the first year look like?
After your initial training, you’ll join one of our experienced teams working on a client project, experiencing different technologies, domains, and working practices. This may involve you undertaking one of our Engineering courses for a specific role, such as Front-end Developer, Full-stack Developer, Platform Engineer, or other discipline first.
Your learning doesn't stop there though. In your first year you'll receive further off-project training in techniques like TDD and OOP, explore Clean Code, Application Security and System Integration, as well as monthly reading groups.
On completion of your first year, you’ll receive a City & Guilds accreditation and be ready to continue your journey in BJSS.
How will I be supported?
Everyone at BJSS is assigned a Squad Lead, who is responsible for pastoral care at BJSS, as well as your Capability Lead (Capabilities are like departments in other companies, such as Development, Data and so on). You’ll also get a “buddy” – this is someone who has been through the Academy before that will be able to help you on your journey at BJSS, who you can ask questions to that you may not feel comfortable asking other colleagues.
On top of this, for the first year you will be supported by an Academy Ambassador. Their role within the business is to be your advocate, to ensure that you get placed on the right projects, get the right support and equality of opportunity across the business. Your ambassador will be your main contact point in that first year, helping you set learning and development goals, ensuring you are succeeding in your role, and running your probation and first annual review with your Squad Lead.
What work will I be doing?
There’s not really a normal day, but you’ll be working in a team alongside other BJSS colleagues to deliver solutions for our clients using various Agile delivery methods. One day you could be fixing a long-standing UI bug, the next you could be working on core messaging technology for a new piece of functionality.
All our projects are different as we work directly with our clients to develop solutions for them. You could be using React, Node and Postgres on one project, then using Java, Spring and using event-driven paradigms on another. We use most programming languages across all our clients, so whether you’re keen on Typescript or Java, C# or Python, Java or Go, you’ll have the opportunity to work with all of them over time.
What career opportunities are there for me?
At BJSS, training, progression, and promotion is all about you. We don’t operate a rigid step-by-step career path, or linear model, like you might expect. We offer a more “lattice” structure, meaning you can develop your career in whatever direction you want at the time.
As an example, you might start by doing Javascript development, but get experience of DevOps in your role and want to become a Platform Engineer. Or a Business Analyst. Or a Data Engineer. The options are nearly limitless, and our job is to help you achieve these goals rather than hold you back to an inflexible hierarchy. You might join our D&I Champions, or become a Squad Lead, or a Tech lead on your project – the sky’s the limit!
What’s the interview process?
We’ve tried to keep it as lightweight and simple as possible, so after you apply with your CV one of our friendly Talent Team will give you a call to discuss your application further and answer any questions you have.
Then we’ll send you a short online tech test which you can complete in any programming language, followed by an online pair programming session with some of our BJSS Engineers (and probably Academy alumni). Don’t worry about this test! We’re looking for passion and potential, it will not be a knowledge-based interview asking you to invert a binary tree or do any “leet code”!
There’s a final culture fit interview with your chosen office so you can ask any questions about the office itself, the clients, projects, and so on.
