Industrial Placement Software Engineer Review

My day to day role involves creating software systems architecture to design aspects of the software within our project. It has also involved writing scripts to test our system works as per the requirement specification. We have two SCRUM meetings a week to discuss on a project - team level the challenges we are facing in our tasks during the week. More recently, I have been able to review other (more senior) team members' work, raising comments to improve the work.

My problem solving has significantly improved, especially in the early days of the placement. Inter-personal skills was a particularly weak area for me pre-placement, but since joining (mostly due to a working from home environment), I have personally grown in confidence to be able to start conversations with colleagues I had not met before.

Throughout the placement, we have been treated as a fully qualified member of the team, given the same responsibility as Lead and Principal Software Engineers.

Help was always on hand from all the project team I was part of. All members of the team were happy and willing to chat about work, give guidance, even tutorials on how to do certain aspects of the job. I was allocated a buddy when joining but did not have much contact from him.

Company culture unfortunately can be slightly behind the times. I of course can only give feedback on company culture for the Rochester, Kent site, but having heard from other graduates and Industrial Placement students, there have been occasions of sexist comments made in the workplace (something to be aware of). Personally, I have never had any issues, and the management are very aware of issues going on, and very keen to push D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) training throughout the site. There are a range of clubs to join (not as many as pre-COVID), and more starting as time goes on

I enjoyed the placement I was on. I was placed on a good team, where the team were appreciative of my help and were also willing to give their own help. Of course the range of work you partake in depends on both which project you are allocated to, and also what point in the project you join. Previously at BAE Systems, you were rotated between projects after 4-6 months. I feel like my professional development would have been better had this still been going on.

Yes

The interview process consists of an online assessment, followed by a video interview, followed by a personal and technical video interview (at the time of COVID) with the chief software engineer. My advice is to brush up on the perhaps forgotten software/programming technical knowledge learnt throughout A-Level and degree, as this may be introduced in the interview.