A graduate’s journey….

I started at Rowe 2 years ago as a Graduate Software Engineer having studied computer science at Plymouth University. I did not have much experience in the industry but when I joined, I was given a lot of support in starting my career. In this post, I’m going to go through the ways that Rowe IT helped me through this process.

Support

From day one I was put in a team full of experienced software engineers who were always happy to help with any problems or questions I had. When you are starting off in your career you might have some experience coding but not a lot of experience writing professional code in a team. This can be a steep learning curve, so working with a team who are always there to explain and walkthrough any issues massively helped me in learning how to do my job.

Mentor

When I started on my project I was paired up with a mentor on my team, this was someone I could go to with any questions about the project. This really helps as a graduate because you will probably be asked to use tools and learn systems you have never come across before. For me, this included: version control, ticketing systems, unit testing, peer reviews. These are topics you cover briefly at university but not to the level you use them in your career. Having a mentor there to explain these things really helped when starting out.

Teamwork

By working in a team where you are encouraged to ask for help and learn by working with others more experienced than yourself, you can pick up more challenging work. Throughout my time as a graduate software engineer, I was given opportunities to do all different types of development on our project. This involved working on tasks in all areas of development from front end web pages to database schemas. This gave me a huge amount of experience and would not have been possible if I was not in a team that encouraged learning from others and building up strong skill sets.

My first year at Rowe as a graduate software engineer taught me a lot. I learnt about how to write professional code, communicate with clients and how to work well as part of a team. These are great skills I can now use and develop throughout my career.