How did I get here ?
When leaving college, like most people at that age, I was very unsure on what I wanted to do next in life and was overwhelmed by the choice and the pressure put on this ! I knew I wanted to get into coding, but didn't know whether to go to university or to get an apprenticeship.
When looking at Apprenticeships, I found Carbon Six Digital and saw they offered a Degree Apprenticeship. This was a 4 year course where I could work and complete my degree alongside. Perfect !
After interviews etc. I got an offer to join and snapped up the opportunity agreeing to join, shortly after I finished my exams in June 2018. The first few months was a steep learning curve as I'd previously not had much experience with C# and all my college or personal projects were either simple websites or Java applications.
I settled into the team well and got more comfortable with Umbraco CMS and the development work involved. I believe it was around 3 months into the apprenticeship when I worked on a full website rebuild for a client. This was amazing for me and I learnt loads by being able to get stuck in.
4 years on and I'm now a Level 4 (Senior) Developer at Carbon Six and have worked on a whole range of Umbraco and HubSpot websites. Not only getting involved in the back-end development, but also front-end, hosting & Infrastructure, solution design, and support for a range of projects.
If you'd had asked me when I started where I'd be now, I wouldn't have even dreamt I would've learnt this much especially with having the degree alongside and that using up most of my free time.
What have I learnt through the degree ?
Although very difficult to manage at times due to the workload the degree has taught me valuable lessons.
The first of these being organisation and time management, knowing that there were upcoming deadlines and having to plan out my time to fit everything in before them. There were moments throughout the degree where this was difficult to manage, but by breaking down the tasks into more manageable chunks this helped to allocate time to tasks to start making more progress.
Another lesson learnt from this was working under pressure, when finishing work and then having to pick up university work for the rest of the evening it was difficult. Especially, when a deadline was fast approaching ! I used many techniques to break up work time and university time to relieve the pressure and stress, to reset my brain and increase my productivity.
Looking back at the journey..
It's been a valuable experience, and the final year project was a great opportunity for me to demonstrate them skills in to a final project solution. The workplace project was based on a sales tracking application and this integrated with many third-party systems to retrieve data and POST data to other systems.
Completing the degree was a massive relief, and looking back it was well worth it. I'm now looking forward to the extra spare time I have and using this time to learn even more.
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