Category: News

Furness College Work Experience

Day 1:

My week placement from Furness College at 3SL started with an introduction to the company’s employees, courtesy of Jan. She briefly addressed their roles and explained the layout of the office, before showing me to my desk. There was a laptop set up ready, and it was on this I’d be working for the rest of the week.

The first task given to me was to work through Cradle’s comprehensive tutorial, so I could learn its functionality through experience. This knowledge, albeit gradually gained, would serve me well over the following days.

Day 2:

My second day began with one of 3SL’s Support Engineers, Cam, explaining how to operate their development database. It was very intuitive, being another instance of the Cradle software. If anything demonstrates a company has confidence in its product; it’s the fact that they use it themselves.

On here, the company had prepared a series of tests for me to perform across many of Cradle’s various facets. These helped to expand my understanding of Cradle’s applications, and gave me a valuable insight into the procedures involved in testing a software product.

Day 3:

The third day, I was taught again by Cam on how to navigate and utilise the support call database, where the company logs any exchanges they have with their customers. One feature of this particular service is said database’s external accessibility – which, if they’re so inclined, allows Cradle users to see how their call is progressing.

Some calls may reveal flaws in the software; either by exposing bugs overlooked during testing, or by bringing to light new issues.

Customers may also call to investigate whether Cradle provides a certain feature they’ve found themselves needing. If it doesn’t, the suggested feature is filed into a list of those potentially included in the future. As this list is weighted by demand, periodic reviews are held to consider Cradle’s direction with these requests in mind.

I also learned about the internal testing, performed by the support department prior to software release.

Day 4:

On day four, I had the opportunity to meet the company’s programmers. They provided me with a document of both requirements and background information to their current project; then asked me to consider how I would approach the same problem. I was told to consider how elements of the software already present could be reused to accomplish a different objective – one of the key skills for any developer to have. This is because modularised code is not only far more versatile; but far more stable too.

De-constructing, the method by which a goal is achieved into componential steps (allocating a minimalistic concern per element) allows one to maintain track of all the necessary inputs and outputs at each. With these in isolation, another programmer – or even the selfsame at a later date – need not know exactly how a particular element of the broader system works in order to utilise it effectively; as they know what to feed into it and what it will produce in return.

I also learned one of the reasons bugs can appear only on the user’s version of the program, is that the optimisation processes of the IDE-external compiler can make alterations to the finalised code. Whilst this is typically a positive thing, there are instances whereby the structural changes may interfere with the core functionality of the software.

Day 5:

My final day of work experience at 3SL consisted of: watching a pair of videos explaining software as a service; being given a tour of the company’s social media, including some of the behind-the-scenes on how posts are produced; and writing this blog post to record everything I’ve learned this week.

L Anderson Work Experience Oct 2019

Work Experience – Introduction

Work Experience is a chance for young people to gain knowledge of what an average working day in a certain place is like. It is also used to demonstrate how to handle the step from school to work.

St. Bernard’s school have recently  sent year 10 on a week’s work experience to various work placements from 11th to the 15th February 2019, one of them being here at 3SL.

The first day , Monday included the introduction to the workplace and what it was about. The product produced is called Cradle, after a brief introduction we were given a Tutorial on how the product functioned. This meant that over the week tasks that included the use of Cradle became easier to do.

The second day required knowledge of Cradle, as the main task was to test functions from the previous update – 7.4 .  One test being shown below;

Testing Example

Our task was to go through each test and find out if it passed and if not why not , above is an example of one of the tests that was passed.

The third day – Wednesday called for the design of a data set. The task was to present understanding of the way data was represented. The task was done by entering the  stationery into  a database that was started from scratch.

The fourth day was specifically for training for later life – CVs and a mock interview. The morning was set for the purpose of writing the CVs as well as this the day was taken up with a design task. The problem was a pretend company needed a more efficient way of packaging their goods. This had to be accomplished without using unnecessary pay and manual labour.  The task –  to come up with the requirements needed to accomplish such an operation.

The second part of the day was used for the mock interview. This was a process that gave an experience of being interviewed for a job. Questions that were more general were added. Subject specific questions , all the questions asked were and example of what might be expected in a real interview.

Design task

The fifth day, Friday, was used to learn about media and it’s effect on company. This was put into effect by the job of writing  about the tasks set during the week of work experience . This was to be posted on 3SL’s website.

At the end of the week , the experience was used to teach about the work environment and what to expect after the jump from school to work.

Josh B , Iwan C – St Bernards

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