Hi, we are Chloie Gadia and Georgia Graham and we’ve just completed our Year 12, week-long work experience with RDT. We both study Computer Science at A level and came to RDT looking for an insight into the outside world of computing.

During our placement at RDT, we met with a diverse range of people, learnt about the company and watched Agile methodology in action, all while completing a week long project.  The project we completed related to the Mars Rover.

We had to enable the user to implement rover objects, a set space for them to move in and then be able to give them instructions on where to go.

Coming into the experience, we had no commercial coding knowledge, we had only ever coded in Python and were definitely not experts on object-oriented programming! However, now we have completed it, we feel more experienced, are able to code in C# and have a much greater understanding of OOP.

The RDT team definitely helped with this progress; though the project seemed daunting at first, we were given a lot of help when we needed it and got over these initial worries almost straight away.

Watching the company operate using Scrum and Kanban methods was also a learning curve for us. We were able to watch how the agile methodology really worked in a project setting.  We  also used it ourselves to complete the project. This introduced us to a whole new outlook on how projects are run, one that we definitely couldn’t have learnt in a classroom.

Unlike most work placements, we were given the opportunity to speak to people not much older than us about their experiences and routes into the workplace, . We were told about working for RDT during an internship and a placement year, whilst at university which could lead into a job offer post-degree, and also about undertaking a degree-apprenticeship whilst being employed at RDT.  . Not only was this very useful and informative, opening our eyes to different routes to qualification, but it also showed us that RDT was thinking beyond this one week and that our experience could open up opportunities for us in the future with the company.

The week was definitely a huge learning curve for us and we’re very glad we could be a part of it. RDT has a very friendly atmosphere and team which made it easy for us to settle in and feel comfortable. We would definitely recommend this experience to others our age and would happily spend time with RDT again.