Tesco Bank have been our partners for more than five years, helping us establish our graduates in the tech industry. They have welcomed more than fifty CodeClanners!
We recently caught up with Fraser Thompson, Principal Engineer at Tesco Bank, to hear about how their most recent CodeClan graduates are getting on.
Tell us about working at Tesco Bank, what’s your favourite thing about working there?
I really like the bridge between the commercial and the banking side, we have a lot of working relationships with our colleagues at Tesco Store, we have a huge customer base and that requires a lot of front end customer facing projects. But that’s what people generally like, the variety of things we work on, there are not two days that are the same!
We work on a wide variety of different projects in the Software Development team, we work on tech stacks which are extremely modern and very interesting. A lot of our work it’s very customer based, it’s at the heart of everything we do, we put customers first in the decision making process. It’s something that I really enjoy, the human aspect and using cutting edge technology to make lives easier.
What’s the training and onboarding process like for CodeClan graduates in Tesco Bank?
CodeClan graduates start as Associate Software Engineers and they are on a nine month programme. In this programme, they get assigned a mentor that looks after them during this period.
The first weeks in a new job, especially in a new industry, can be very intimidating and we don’t want our associate engineers to be left on their own! We certainly understand that someone cannot be making code from day one, so the first months you’re very well looked after and we will help you to keep growing and learning.
The mentor our Associate Software Engineers are assigned will be one of our senior engineers or one of our recent CodeClan graduates that has been there a couple of years. We have regular 121s, so we make sure everyone’s happy and we take in consideration what people want to work on as well, these catch ups are great for that.
There’s a lot of training available, they have access to online tools such as Pluralsight. Also, once a month we host a practice session, which are a variety of presentations across the engineering team, generally aimed at people who are new to the industry, to show what we’re working on, the new ideas.
What kind of projects are CodeClan graduates working on right now/will be working?
Some of them are working across the technology stack as well as supporting some transformation programmes. Whereas others are working on very front end customer facing projects, the origination journeys of the bank as well.
What’s special about the Codeclan graduates?
It’s the life experience they bring to the team. Everyone who has gone through CodeClan is extremely motivated, driven and they have shown a passion for learning.
Nobody I’ve ever worked with from CodeClan has been afraid to speak up as well or contribute, they’re always asking questions, they’re an absolute pleasure to work with.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to join Tesco Bank?
My main advice would be to explore and be curious, what interests you the most? We want to help people to achieve their career goals. Would you want to be working in customer focused projects, or maybe prefer to be in the backend?
You’ll have plenty of chances to explore the different sides of Software Development once you join Tesco Bank but we want you to be working on what you enjoy the most from day one!
