8th August 2024

Maximizing potential through Adaptive’s Early Careers Program

Introduction

When Adaptive was founded in 2012, an important goal was to bring together smart, like-minded people who are enjoyable to work with. Our collaborative, friendly, and team-oriented culture is an important part of our DNA, and we have always tried to grow organically through our internal referral program and the excellent work of our recruitment team, who try to find the right candidates who will add to our culture.

As an extension of this effort, in 2018, we started a graduate program, which we have continued to evolve and improve every year into what is today the Adaptive Early Careers Program. In 2021, amidst a global pandemic, nine candidates graduated from our web development program across all of our offices in London, New York, Barcelona, and Montreal.

Why we have an Early Careers Program

The reasons why we kicked off the program in 2018 still hold true today:

Hiring talented staff continues to be ultra-competitive in all the territories in which we operate.
We can hire raw but passionate people embarking on their careers and help them grow into targeted and focused employees who can fit well into our high-performing teams.
We can bring in new eyes and fresh ideas to invigorate the company.
We are able to teach candidates about the Adaptive approach and embed them in it right from the start so that it becomes as important to them as it is to us.
It provides engagement opportunities for our existing staff, who enjoy mentoring, training and interacting with the candidates.
Several people at Adaptive have past experience running or being involved with graduate programs and have seen the positive impetus they can provide.

Adaptive Early Careers Program timeline

After advertising for positions in our program, we engage senior leaders in Adaptive who exemplify our culture to interview candidates in a friendly and thorough manner, both from a technical and behavioral perspective.

When our candidates arrive on day one, they are presented with their laptops, headsets, swag, etc., and then everyone gets to know each other. We have an introduction to the program from HR and an introduction to Adaptive from one of our founders. Then we have some fun together, e.g. building Lego or playing a virtual game, focusing on collaboration and a shared sense of purpose from the outset.

On day two, everyone is writing code–because that is why they joined! What follows is an intensive and hands-on six-month period of in-person training, teamwork, knowledge sharing, and practical learning.

When candidates graduate from the training phase, they join an internal or client project team, where they can continue learning and gaining experience in an actual project environment while being actively supported. After a further 4-5 months, they are usually ready to work on projects as full-fledged developers and team members.

Key components of the Early Careers Program

Training

The goal of the training component of our program is to get participants’ skills and abilities as close as possible to those of the junior developers we hire in as short a time as possible. In many ways, they are in a better position than new joiners, as we teach them in-depth about agile software development, working as a consultant, managing your work and mental health, etc. In addition, they learn from different subject-matter experts across the company about their disciplines.

From a technical perspective, the focus is not on teaching people to code – the candidates we hire can already do that (and if not, this can easily be learned online). Instead, we focus on best practices, understanding how and why things work, picking the right tool for each task, writing maintainable and well-tested code, and not becoming cargo-cult programmer.

Training is always practical and instructor-led, with frequent code reviews and real applications to build. We simulate the work environment on our projects as much as possible and work iteratively and agilely, implementing new concepts as we learn them.

For the web Early Careers Program in 2021, we covered Git and GitHub, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, React, React hooks and state management, Node and npm, TypeScript, RxJS and reactive programming, functional programming etc.

Teamwork

Learning about collaboration and how to be a good team member has been a key focus from the program’s inception. We talk about imposter syndrome, learn the how and why of agile software development practices (through practical experience!), share code ownership, how we succeed and fail together, share planning, do sprint demos for clients and stakeholders, etc.

Teamwork also extends to bonding and having fun together, so we play games together in the office, and have shared lunches and evenings out.

It is wonderful to see how graduates from previous years still catch up regularly to reminisce and have a meal together because of the strong bonds that were formed.

Mentorship

We have worked hard to establish a sound mentoring framework as part of the program. When they join, all participants are paired with a mentor at Adaptive who embarks on their new career journey with them.

Mentors are not part of the program management; instead, they are experienced colleagues, sometimes former graduates of the program themselves. They can advise, guide, and be a friend, both in terms of a career in fintech in general and also in terms of Adaptive’s culture. And sometimes, you need someone to show off your code to!

These relationships often continue after the program has finished, which is great to see.

Knowledge sharing

Another part of Adaptive’s culture is knowledge sharing. This is why subject-matter experts from across the company set aside some of their valuable time to meet the participants and share some of what they do. This gives everyone a clear view of the breadth of Adaptive, covering all aspects from sales to quality assurance to software reliability engineering (SRE).

In addition, participants are given the opportunity to prepare and present two presentations on technology topics of their choosing and receive feedback on their content, delivery style, and how to make their presentations more professional. We usually see amazing improvement in this area and have had some wonderful presentations about topics as diverse as Material UI and Jamstack, which also helps to improve everyone’s technical knowledge and skills.

2022 and the Java Early Careers Program

While we originally started the Early Careers Program to expand our Web Practice, in 2022, we ran a Java-based back-end development program for the first time. Participants in Montreal and New York delved into Java, Spring, reactive programming, and our very own Hydra Platform together.

Meet some real experiences!

Sam Holleworth | London Office
The Adaptive Early Careers Program was the ideal way to bridge that difficult gap between education and profession. It takes whatever technical tools you may have gathered already and sharpens them, while slowly layering in the agile systems and structures Adaptive uses to organise its teams and projects. Your new skills are trained and tested with assignments of increasing scope and technical and organisational complexity. You’ll dive deep into the technologies and into agile which will really deliver the understanding needed to feel confident using them, and the whole time you’ll be guided by experts in both.

In amongst all this intensity Adaptive is a wonderful place to work. The people here often explain how dedicated they are to fostering an environment full of collaboration, discussion and inclusion as well as excellence, and it was clear from the beginning that they walk the walk just as well as they talk the talk.

Alex Cohen | Montréal Office
Based on my experience, I recommend this program to any new developers entering the software industry. This program provides a great introduction to the professional world of software development. You will receive great tutelage and guidance from industry experts that will take you from a programmer at an academic level and elevate it above the industry standard of software development. You could not ask for a greater group of people at Adaptive. The management and colleagues are open, friendly, and willing to work with the new developers to help provide the best learning experience possible.

Victoria Michalska | New York Office
The early careers program taught me what I needed to transition from the rigorous academia of computer science into proper software engineering. I was given a mentor, introduced to engineering concepts and principles that greatly broadened my horizons, and had the space to properly develop my skills before being put on a client project— I really don’t think I would’ve wanted to start my career anywhere else. It truly was worthwhile.