Junior Programs in Melbourne

General
1

Hi, I’m Ryan Bigg and I run the Junior Engineering Program at Culture Amp. I’m posting this today because I’ve heard from @SharonVaughan that there are a lot of juniors out there looking for advice around what to do career-wise.

I’m putting my hand up here on the forum as someone who is available for your questions. You can ask me questions by contacting me on Twitter (@ryanbigg), or by emailing me directly: me@ryanbigg.com. I’m also happy to grab coffee/lunch with you in Melbourne if you’d prefer in-person.

I’ve posted below a small summary of Culture Amp’s JEP which might be of interest to you. However, I should say that we’re not looking to hire any new juniors for the JEP until at least the end of 2019.

I have posted some Q&A on my blog here from this most recent batch of juniors.

I’m still very happy to talk to you and answer your questions about getting a job in this industry. I know it’s pretty tough to do that.

I’ve started this thread for three reasons: 1) I want to say I’m available for you questions and 2) I want other people who are also available to chime in as well and 3) if anyone else is running a similar training program, they should add to this thread as well!

We’re out there and we want to help you. We’re a pretty friendly bunch and we will be more than happy to answer your questions.

So ask us anything!

We’re currently in the 2nd round of the Junior Engineering Program at Culture Amp. You can read about the first round of this program in this three part blog series:

This round, we’ve hired 9 new engineers and we’re training them up on things like React, TypeScript, Ruby on Rails and TDD.

Alongside this, we teach more of the “meta skills” as well:

  • What constitutes good clean code?
  • How do I prioritise my workload?
  • How do I get and act on feedback from my peers?
  • How can I progress my career forward?

We do these things by running a “kickstart” training program for 8 weeks (we’re currently in the 3rd week of this), and then we place the juniors into teams. Then, every 3rd week, they come back to the program for some further learning and development quality time. So you can think of it like a mix of bootcamp-style learning, as well as plenty of on the job training. Each junior is also paired up with a Mentor who helps with career advice on a weekly basis.

If you want more info, I would recommend reading the blog posts and then asking me any questions you have.

3 Likes
2

That’s a great post @radar, FWIW I have been through a Junior Program myself at Qantas Hotels and am more than happy to provide advice to people who are interested in either getting ready to apply for one, or are interested in what it was like to do one.

I have been a dev for 2 years now (the first 12 months was a lot of me saying WTF as I hadn’t done a bootcamp and was self taught). The last 12 months after doing a 6 month junior dev program have been amazing! If you also need general advice if you’re struggling to figure out what to learn, how to get that first gig I’m more than happy to help (as I was a recruiter in my past life so I get what a good career plan/CV/etc look like).

2 Likes
3

I’ve written up a blog post about the first 8 weeks of Culture Amp’s 2nd JEP here: https://ryanbigg.com/2019/03/jep-2-first-8-weeks