Early Careers Program | My journey with Adaptive as an Early Careers developer

This year, it’s my first anniversary at Adaptive and I am glad to look back and see the great path I’ve walked to become the developer I am today, thanks to my colleagues at Adaptive. With this blog post, I would like to inspire inexperienced but passionate developers so they don’t get discouraged when looking for their first experience. There are companies out there that are willing to help them develop their careers in tech and Adaptive is a clear example of that.

How did it all start?

The first time I knew about Adaptive was through a job posting on Linkedin. The job description for Graduate Front End Developers included training in software development, the financial industry, and practical project work. I was at the peak of my job search and this definitely piqued my interest. As some of you know if you’ve been looking for a job for a while, many companies require at least one year of experience even for an entry-level position!

I was one of the lucky persons to be selected for the first round of interviews and had the chance to speak with Marie, our Chief Talent Officer. She was kind and made me feel comfortable even though I was very nervous. Marie told me everything about Adaptive and how it was formed by college students like myself, so that they understood the position we’re in when looking for our first jobs out of college.

That was the first time I realized Adaptive was different, by listening to Marie speak about her experience with the company and management so far. The interview process was fairly fast with no waiting game. They valued the time invested in the interviews and I got to speak with some amazing people with whom I work now.

The Program

I remember my first day at the office meeting the other grads. We met our agile and front-end instructors virtually in London and our mentors in the NY office. Our instructor Riko Eksteen, the delivery lead of the Early Careers Program, was such a wonderful teacher. He started us off with the basics and would dive deep into each topic. We began with vanilla Javascript and advanced our way up to Typescript and React Hooks. The most important thing about the graduate program was the time given to apply what we learned and build projects. While learning Javascript we also had to build a simple stopwatch application. Riko held code review sessions and 1-1 sessions if we still had any doubts about why a piece of code was not working or even why it was working! Understanding the whys and hows made a difference in my problem-solving and code development approach.

After learning React Hooks we were paired off in teams to mimic an agile environment and deliver a more advanced application. This allowed us to know how the teams operate in building different financial web applications on a day-to-day basis.

They also taught us sprint ceremonies like planning, retrospectives, and stakeholder demos; and we learned how to use CSS by creating mock websites with different layouts and responsive designs.

Our mentors met up with us every week and helped us get through any technical issues we were facing or if we were stuck at any point in our practical work.

Those first three months of the grad program were pretty intense. I had to learn a lot of information in a very short amount of time but I enjoyed the entire process. All of our mentors were readily available and helpful even if it was a small thing that we were stuck on. The culture at Adaptive is open and friendly, and it’s inherent in all the employees I had the opportunity to talk to.

At the end of the program, we also had an assessment and I saw a difference in my coding approach and writing style in comparison to when I was interviewing for the first time with Adaptive which helped me see my growth in just three months.

Post Early Careers Program

It took two months to get onboarded on my first client but the time spent waiting was equally productive. Olivier Scherrer, scheduled meetings and gave me topics to study that were used in the client project and helped resolve my queries or confusion I may have.

Currently, I’m working on an exciting fast paced project with amazing team members. The best part is definitely the openness between us all. I do not feel embarrassed or awkward reaching out to my teammates when I don’t understand a particular functionality or discuss a better solution to the current implementation.

I still stumble at times or get stuck but everyone is incredibly helpful and friendly in assisting me. We celebrate all milestones of the project, have fun developing and learning. My mentor Christi Reid still meets up with me biweekly and uplifts me whenever I feel overwhelmed or unsure about how to deal with certain things and soft skills essential when working with clients.

The Early Careers Program has helped me become a better, more assertive developer. It also helped me meet some amazing people and make friends.