Northcoders has helped over 600 people kick-start their coding career to become junior software engineers. But what can be done to help our graduates grow in their roles? There’s still a gap in the industry for mid-level engineers, and we’ve come up with a solution for how we can work with companies to fill it.

Introducing DevLabs

DevLabs is the first step towards helping our partners across the North, and our graduates thrive through continued learning. Technology doesn't stop evolving. Nor should we. DevLabs isn't just about learning from our experts. It's a unique opportunity for your Northcoders graduates and your team to benefit from shared knowledge within the Northcoders community, too.

Training is a priority for new software engineers. Being in a position to offer DevLabs to our graduates will give you the competitive edge when it comes to hiring the right people for your business.

But it's not just about hiring diverse talent.

It's about keeping it. Training is proven to have a positive effect on retention - and in such a competitive industry, that's more important than ever.

DevLabs is a continued professional development programme to help your business train and retain top talent and benefit from deepened knowledge by investing in their skills, at no extra cost.

How does DevLabs work?

DevLabs consists of a sequence of five topics, each one developing and extending understanding, with tasks both to engage in on-site and then to explore and consolidate the concepts covered before the next session. This includes:

> Background reading to get everyone on the same page

> A day on-site with Northcoders

> A day working remotely to continue exploring the content independently

Who is DevLabs for?

DevLabs is a bespoke training programme for Northcoders graduates within your business. The course begins once a Northcoders graduate has been in your business for three months.

What does DevLabs cover?

> DevOps (recommended for Back End Developers)

• Containers: building images and networking (with Docker)
• Continuous integration, delivery and deployment: build pipelines with staging platforms, automated testing and feedback loops (with Jenkins)
• Cloud infrastructure: cloud computing, databases, networking and security (with AWS)
• Cloud infrastructure automation: automated deployment processes and modularisation (with Terraform)
• Cloud native architecture: stateless containers, storage, service to service comms and monitoring metrics

We will explore best security practices as appropriate throughout the course

> Applied Testing (recommended for Front End Developers)

• Introducing Front End Testing: Introduce TDD to incrementally build a front-end application against business-style acceptance criteria
• Mocking network requests: Mock and stub network requests to handle responses and errors from third-party APIs
• Dealing with components: Develop a reusable component library and mock external dependencies
• Extracting the service layer: Consolidate an application with maintainability and extensibility in mind
• Testing cloud functions: Develop unit tests for cloud based services and gain confidence with integration tests; introducing contract testing

We will explore testing approaches as appropriate throughout each session.

To find out more, go tonorthcoders.com/DevLabsor get in touch at[email protected].