Finishing My Apprenticeship

A few weeks ago, I started the beginning of the end of my apprenticeship. After a year of creating a portfolio and finishing my vendor and knowledge exams, I was ready to start the process of finishing.

There were 2 things left for me to do:

1. A final synoptic project
2. An interview with a BCS assessor

Synoptic Project

A little while ago we were given 3 briefs to choose from, that would become the synoptic project. The briefs gave a short outline of what would need to be done, with minimal detail. To avoid breaking any rules I won’t go into much detail regarding the briefs, but the one I chose involved creating a REST API.

My suggestion for the project is to practice the setup before hand, and even have a template ready to go for when you start. I had a base project ready to go with my framework in a place where it launched fine, and also had tests running. I spent some time changing my test framework from JUnit to Spock, which is something I could have figured out before I started.

I would also suggest practicing coding a whole project at least once. Even without all the information, you get enough info to make some guesses about what will be asked for, and even if you are completely wrong, the experience and knowledge will be transferable to the real project.

I had a week to complete the project, making sure to cover each step of the Software Development Life Cycle, which means I did all the planning and designing before starting, and made sure to cover testing and deployment after finishing development.

I followed the same principle I had for my portfolio of screenshotting everything, and doing a bit of a write up as I went along. This made it much easier to produce documentation for the project.

Interview

A week or so after finishing the project, I had an interview with a BCS assessor. He asked me questions about my portfolio, my project, and my general work at Tesco.

Mostly the questions were asking for context around pieces of work I had done, and for explanations for some coding decisions I had made.

Overall I think it went well, even though I was nervous, I think I managed to answer everything he asked of me.

Results

A week after my interview, I received my results. I am extremely happy to say I got a Distinction!

A years worth of hard work paid off, and I am so happy to achieved what I have. I have learned so much on this apprenticeship, and looking back at what I knew a year ago, it’s crazy to me that I have done as much as I have!