Since 2012 1E has operated a Graduate Training Scheme within our software engineering department. We all recently joined the company as part of their second intake of graduates. This graduate diary series we hope will allow future graduates to get a feel for life at 1E.
If you've been following us from our previous blog posts, you probably know that we've found 1E to be a great place for recent graduates to work. Though 1E has experts in a variety of subject matter, information transfer isn't always easy, especially when one of the participants is a graduate. Despite being a practice that usually occurs in much larger companies, 1E also operates a mentorship programme. This was set up to help graduates become accustomed to the methodologies and practices that are part of working at 1E.
Shortly after joining 1E, we were each assigned a mentor that would assist us through the graduate scheme. This was done in a formal fashion, where they would assign us objectives and milestones that we were able to work towards. This helped us develop our skills and product knowledge during actual work for the company, as opposed to more meaningless training scenarios. Our mentors would have regular catch ups with us and discuss our daily progress. They would take the time to walk us through concepts and hurdles, even if we felt we were distracting them from their usual tasks. Mistakes are bound to occur when you're new to a role, but they were never an issue with our mentors, who encouraged us to learn from our experiences. It is easy to see that our mentors were picked for both their experience and skillsets, as well as their friendliness. It was up to us to prove ourselves worthy of the mentors’ time and effort. Nowadays, we don’t lean so much on our mentors, but work without pairing up, but the foundations they gave us was a massive boost in the early days of our careers with the company.