The Platform Academy. Be a Game Changer.

We asked Antoine, one of our most recent Academy recruits, what he enjoyed most about his six week intensive training and how it’s given him a solid platform for his brand new career with Kainos.

“I joined Kainos in March this year, so I’ve only been here a few months, but a lot has happened!”.

I was an Application Support Analyst for about 3 years, heavily involved in the operations side, working with inhouse software that was managed by the company developers. I knew I didn’t want to go into the software development side of things because the DevOps world always interested me. I’m really interested in cloud technologies such as docker and Kubernetes, and I’d experimented a little with docker. But without the base knowledge and no real practical use for it, I found it hard to grasp. I’d also played around with Azure free account and AWS in my own time but was not really introduced to it commercially.

Then I got a call from one of Kainos’ Talent Acquisition Partners. We spoke on the phone and she described the role, how Kainos’ Platform Academy works, and the technologies involved. It sounded perfect for me - exactly what I’ve been looking for: a way to get into the DevOps world. Plus - big plus! - six solid weeks of training on new technologies. I couldn’t believe the opportunity at first.

I agreed to an interview and the Consultant gave me all the info I needed to research Kainos. I was amazed. I was really impressed by their work in the public sector with the UK Government.

Many companies say this, but I believed it about Kainos. You can see it in their Glassdoor scores. All the employee reviews I read were positive and Kainos has been listed as one of the top 100 companies to work for. It all helped to make my mind up.

The Platform Academy lasted for six weeks. And wow what a six weeks it was! We learnt so much and covered a variety of cloud technologies. I really enjoyed the style of teaching and hands-on projects. Our mentor let us explore solutions to the issues ourselves before showing us how it’s done. We were exposed to a lot of things we wouldn’t have had the chance to look at otherwise.

Six of us joined the Platform Academy at the same time and, because of COVID, we used Zoom as our office which enabled us to talk, bounce ideas around, fix issues, and complete our daily project tasks.

Week one started with Linux, Vagrant and Ansible, then moved onto Terraform the following week, which was the main technology focus of the Academy. It’s an infrastructure as code tool that helps you build and maintain resources on cloud platforms, and I really enjoyed using it.

We also had a group chat on Teams where we could throw in questions or have random banter! It all made the Academy really fun and the six weeks went by quickly. I learnt a lot from the other guys as we were all from different backgrounds. We often had different ways of solving the same issues which was really great to see and be part of.

We also had couple of social nights as well where we played the computer game , trying to not look was really challenging. Some of the guys had better poker faces than others!

Embracing Change. Working Together.

“I’ve been impressed by how Kainos has handled working remotely during the pandemic and they’re talking about the future of office/home working which is interesting”.

I noticed that with the rise in working from home during the pandemic, there was also a rise in digital adoption in all kinds of businesses. There’s no better company at helping other companies transform than Kainos. They’ve already done it a lot, delivering major digital transformation projects across the public and private sector. This will just keep growing with the demand for cloud-based solutions.

As a Platform Engineer, there’s so much opportunity for my career growth here, working on a lot of those incoming projects and gaining valuable knowledge and skillsets.

The end of the Academy was only the beginning. I was immediately put to work on a special project in the public sector, using my new skills. It’s so exciting.

My proudest moment so far was completing my first ticket, submitting my first code to the project main branch, and building the changes using Terraform Apply through Azure Devops pipeline.

My colleagues, Senior Platform Engineers and Solutions Architects, often say “the learning never stops” and this makes me very happy! I love learning and getting gritty with technology.”

Learn more about careers at Kainos here.