What happened on the 9th floor this summer

Thinking of applying for Kainos? Sit tight and let me walk you through my experience!

It's already been months since you accepted the offer for your dream job. You really did it this time! You will soon start your career as a Software Engineer at Kainos.

Things start to get more and more real as time passes. It was only yesterday when you asked your mum to take a picture of you for your brand new Kainos ID card.

Today is the day! You're walking the walk, you're on your first route to work. It's the glass offices, their unbelievable heights or it's just something in the air, something great - you feel it. You have made your way into the building and you're on your way up to where all the magic happens.

You open the door. A lot of new faces. It's loud, they are all getting to know each other. Don, the recruitment lead for Birmingham comes to greet you - you remember Don. He's your go-to if you ever need anything at all!
You go around the room looking for your seat. You sit down, nervous, but so excited. You introduce yourself to the ones sitting to your left and right. It's the great friendships that start with small talk - you discuss interests, University, first impressions. It's getting better by the second.

The next seven weeks will be all about you, about your development both as a Software Engineer and as a Kainos employee. It will be challenging and rewarding. 

You are so ready for this!

The very next day, you're the first one in the office, excited to see what is coming next. You will soon be getting your MacBook. Imagine all the stickers that will be on it in no time! After you're all set up, you will be focusing on the usage of virtual machines to get your ready for the rest of the training. 

Over the next few days, you will be looking into the very basics of relational databases, respectively MySQL. After many CREATE and SELECT statements, you will extend your knowledge to user privileges, query performance and general practices of database design. The very end of the week will be about practising your skills while working in a team. You will be designing and implementing a simple database and presenting your design to your colleagues while justifying your decisions. 

You got the relational databases all figured out so now it's time for the big guns - this week you will be about learning object-oriented programming while developing your Java skills. You go all the way from data structures, variables and classes to encapsulation, polymorphism, testing and exception handling to collections, iterators and streams.

 Next, version control - so you will also focus on gaining a better understanding of the classics - git branch, git checkout, git add, git commit and git push together forever-ongoing git rebase vs git merge. 
The end of the week is as you know it - Thursdays are for practising your skills and Fridays are for presenting your work. This week, the former is about developing an employee management system using both Java and MySQL while solving the usual git conflicts and the latter is a demo of your application. 

We all love the Web - so the third week is all about web development. You go all the way from HTML and CSS to JavaScript, Node and Angular and Bootstrap. To bring everything together, you'll learn about integrating your web application with relational databases with the use of Express. 
During the last two days of the week, you will be working with your teammates to extend last week's employee management system. 

Next, as sometimes it's hard to admit - we, the Software Engineers have to actually test our code. You know it, I know it. So this week is all about testing - unit tests, integration and end-to-end testing. After covering the theory, you will spend most of this week practising testing. You'll familiarise yourself with the best practices, various technologies and techniques. Testing doesn't sound bad after all, does it? 
Over the last days of the week, you will be attending Cyber Security sessions, the time when you will be the greatest hacker of all while also learning how to best protect yourself from numerous attacks.

Like the previous week, the fifth week focuses on multiple topics. The week starts with a Presentation Skills workshop because you're never too good at presentations. You'll be learning from the very best - so who's better at presentations than the one and only Steve Jobs when introducing the iPhone back in 2007? 
The next day, you will be attending an Applied Innovation workshop during which you will be given the opportunity of bringing the product of your dreams to life and pitch this idea in front of your colleagues. Here, at Kainos, we deeply care about users - so the following day is dedicated to a UX Workshop where you will be learning how to best understand the user's needs.

The last two weeks of the training are focusing on a real Agile project. Divided in two sprints, each of one week, you will be working in a team of ten to develop a system for the Kainos employees. You will be closely working with the Business Analyst and the Product Owner to deliver a system that best fits your client's needs. You will be in full control of your design as well as the technologies used. At the end of each week, you will be presenting your progress in front of other Kainos employees. This is a great time for practising everything you have learnt during the training together will the best Agile practices. 

You did it!

Seven weeks of extremely hard work come to an end. It is now time to get feedback from your mentors on your progress throughout the weeks. You will also hear about the very first project you will be working on and it all sounds so exciting! And, of course, to put it all to an end, you will be celebrating the end of the Engineering Academy with all the other trainees and your mentors.

You are so ready for this!

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