Our award winning graduate Academy has helped build our exceptional technology practice since 2013. Find out how it can help build yours.
About Our Academy
History
We ran our first Academy back in 2013. At the time, we were hiring junior people into our consulting teams with maths, comp-sci and engineering degrees. We often found ourselves having to provide training for the roles we needed them to undertake with our customers and sometimes individuals with the right technical skills were lacking in some of the harder to teach soft-skills required to work effectively in collaborative teams.
To address this, we took the decision in 2013 to bring in 13 individuals, hiring them based on technical aptitude as well as the required soft skills, drive, determination and resilience. Once we knew we had the right people, we gave them the required skills to be effective, working for our customers as part of our consulting teams.
In 2016, we extended this model beyond fulfilling our own demand, to provide individuals directly to customers who were looking for flexible ways to bring in the best junior talent and with the best training. Our customers were delighted then and continue to be delighted with our people today, hiring them after a period of time and growing their own permanent teams and capability.
Core Principles
Our Academy has changed since the early days. In fact, we constantly seek to improve on all aspects of the experience. What hasn’t changed however, are the underlying values that underpin our Academy, these are summarised by the Academy core principles:
Social Mobility
No-one should have to take a loan or burn through savings in order to join the Academy. We pay a salary from day one throughout training and we provide accommodation during training until placement.
Diversity
No-one should be denied a career in technology based on a decision they made at school, restricting their future career choices before they’ve even considered them. We don’t mandate a STEM degree. We select people based on their natural aptitude and rely on our quality training to prepare them for a career in technology, rather than their degree.
Investment And Integrity
Everyone who successfully completes the core training should have a career in technology. We invest in people and they invest their time in us. Everyone who has completed the Academy has been placed with customers and goes on to build a successful career in technology.
Inclusion And Diversity
By following our core principles, we are able to cast the net wider, providing greater opportunity to the best people without the restrictions that would normally exclude them from a career in technology. This is reflected in our diversity statistics. To date, 31% of Academy Engineers are women and 40% of our Academy Engineers identify as BAME. We’re very proud of these this, but we continue to improve. Recent Academy cohorts have been as high as 61% women.