Application Development Associate Review

I attend university every Monday all day. The rest of the week is spent working with clients of Accenture to help improve their business through technology. For me that normally involves developing testing and maintaining their applications. This involves keeping up with my team with daily scrums, checking emails/ tickets for daily tasks and coding/ scripting depending on what I am assigned.

I have picked up a myriad of new skills including programming in Java and Go, developing using AWS cloud solutions and more general programming skills like using Git and shell scripts. University has helped with learning a more theoretical side to the job, such as network protocols, algorithms etc. as well as teaching some business writing and time management skills.

I enjoy the program a great deal and find that I get more out of it the more I put in. Among my few concerns is the fact that I do not have time to participate in many university led activities although this is partly down to the fact I commute for over an hour (would not recommend to anyone thinking of doing this).

The university course seems very well structured although there are a few modules that I don't really see the point in (Business Structure modules and such) as I believe we can gather everything we learn from these from our time spent at work. Aside from that, the 1 day a week at uni complemented by the 2 week block modules every few months seems to work quite well and I have found lecturers and staff to be well informed and helpful despite the short amount of time they have to squeeze in all the modules.

Accenture have quite a hands off approach and generally leave it up to the apprentice when it comes to finding/applying for projects within the company. That said, there is a large team of people to help with this aspect if needed but it does feel as though they are there to check up on you sometimes rather than help.

UEL provides a great deal of help and support when working toward the degree. They have a good amount of resources available on their website, including resources hosted by lecturers and a substantial online repository of ebooks available through the library. Remedial sessions seem to be held regularly although as I do not live in London these are a little hard for me to attend sometimes.

I feel that a large amount of what I learn through my degree is irrelevant to my role at work. However, I think that the two still complement each other quite well and I try to see university as a more theory based environment while when I am at work I have a chance to apply my programming skills. There have been a few things (ip adressing, networking) that have helped me better understand my work.

I don't really find the time for these although I am aware that they do exist. Again this is down to me commuting over an hour each way to London. I have attended a couple of TAG (Technology Analyst Group) networking events and found these fun and informative, the atmosphere was nice and it was a great opportunity to meet people on different projects within the company.

Yes

I have never learned as much as in the short time I have been with the company. Although there is little spare time, I enjoy studying for my degree, working on real life development projects and gaining a wealth of skills and knowledge. Accenture has a wide range of interesting clients to work for.

Discipline and time management are really the best skills you can have when applying for something like this. Everything else (programming, networking, business skills etc) can learnt/ developed. Just be prepared to put the hours and effort in (although as an apprentice there is a limit to the hours you can work) and everything else should follow.