Playing catch up

It's 4 weeks into the job and I've just started on my first project. I thought I'd set up this blog for a couple of reasons; to keep people informed of my progress (personal tutor, friends, colleagues etc) and as a personal diary to make writing my final report easier.

So I shall start from the beginning. Actually, I'll start from before the beginning… whenever that was/is.

I'm currently doing an Industrial Placement at Accenture(Technology Solutions) as a Junior Software Engineer. This involves me taking a year out from University and then going back to complete my final year at the end of 2007.

I applied for this job in easter of this year, went through 3 rounds of selection and then started on 3rd July.

The first two days were spent doing general induction stuff at the Old Bailey offices – getting intoduced to various people and learning about the structure of the company, its ethics and values and doing a bit of Computer Based Training (CBT). This was with nineteen other Industrial Placement students (IPs) who have since been placed on various projects all around the country.

After those first two days we moved to a training centre near Old Street station to do the Java Certification School. This was a three week course, cut down to two and a half due to time contraints, which was supposed to take us from unqualified Java programmers (although it did assume previous industrial programming experience) to industry strength Java 5 programmers. It was a tough course, presented by a brilliant instructor, with a bloody hard exam, which resulted in a slightly lower than predicted pass rate of 25% (Sun expect around 40% of people to pass – again, that's the figure for experienced programmers). I did enough to pass so am now a Sun Certified Java Programmer.

After the exam I went up to the Fenchurch Street offices to sort out my first project and got assigned to the BASEL II project in Manchester. For those of you who are interested in what it's about, check out wikipedia.

I've been assigned to the Integration Test team, have moved into the hotel and am settling in nicely. The test systems aren't quite up and running yet so we're all catching up on the technical documentation to try and work out the flow of information around the main system.

I think I'll leave this post here for now. Hope it's been informative for those of you who have got this far, and expect future posts to be of a more technical nature.

: 01 Aug 2006 16:56 |  Tags: Computer Industrial Placement Science |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem