Hi! I’m Ben, I joined Scott Logic as a graduate software developer in March of 2025. This was a bit of a jump for me as it constituted a move from the windy, rainy coast of South East Scotland to the windy, rainy almost coast of North East England. Over the last three months I’ve taken part in the Scott Logic graduate training. This is the first twelve weeks of the graduate programme at Scott Logic, after which comes the graduate project. I’ve gained a lot from the training and want to highlight some of the lessons I’ve learnt whilst walking through my diary of the last few months.

This blog post is aimed at new graduates who are undertaking the training at Scott Logic in the future. I hope this will outline a roadmap of what you can expect from your training, whilst also giving you several key pieces of advice that might have given me a leg up when I started.

My Scott Logic experience started the Friday before graduate introduction week, there was a small meet and greet with some of the graduates and staff who we would get to know more over the next few months. This was a good way to meet a few people and make the start of the programme a bit smoother. It was also when I met our Graduate Coordinator and our Graduate Training Officer, two faces I would get to know and appreciate very well over the following months.

Introduction Week

Then, on the 24th of March, grad week kicked off – at the time feeling very much like a whirlwind. The days were filled with activities and presentations that introduced us to colleagues from throughout the company, of various job roles and responsibilities. These presentations introduced the structure of the company, the key people, and the different roles that exist at Scott Logic. We learnt about Scott Logic’s values and business ethics, had our HR induction, and got our laptops set up.

These induction sessions were very exciting, and my best advice is to enjoy them. There is no exam, and everything that you learn, and everyone that you meet is an introduction – not a total experience. You will get to learn these ideas in more depth, and everyone you meet here you will meet again. This is a good time to join some Slack channels, see what other people in the company are talking about.

The Training Starts

After the introduction week our training started in full. This was a foundational introduction to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Some of us had used these tools before, and some hadn’t. This was fine, there was no expectation that we would walk through the doors as web dev wizards. If you are familiar with these technologies, this is a great time to show off and add a bit of flair to your work.

This first week of training was when I met my mentor and my line manager. Your mentor is a daily contact who will help you find your feet with the training, make sure you’re working to best practices, and give you extra directions to explore whilst you are learning. I feel very lucky to have had a mentor with a broad view of the technology landscape and who was willing to donate her time to help me through issues and difficulties I faced whilst learning.

You will have less frequent contact with your line manager, but they will still have regular check-ins with you. These are to make sure you’re progressing through the training well and that you understand the feedback you’re given. Your line manager will help you take care of your broader professional development whilst you’re with Scott Logic.

One piece of advice I would give here, relevant even at the start of the training, is to get the best understanding of Git you can and to start working to best practices regarding commits and pull requests as early as possible. This will help make sure you are building good habits throughout your training. Additionally, showing work to your mentor early and often is the best way for them to identify your strengths and weaknesses, guiding them as they help you improve. We had several workshops on Git, and they were well worth paying attention to.

Object Oriented Programming

After spending a week on web technologies, we started our Java training. I had worked with Java before whilst at university but there was a noticeable change to working on it in a professional environment. Unit testing, in particular, was something I understood conceptually but was negligent of in practice. Now I have more focus not just on writing unit tests but writing them in a way that detects categories of error in the code I write.

This is when the various styles of thought and problem solving amongst our cohort became visible, especially as the training began to kick up a gear. I was impressed by the number of different approaches to every problem encountered. Here my advice is to use obstacles as learning opportunities. Every bug you squash deepens your understanding of the problem, the language, and the paradigm.

The Scott Logic Community

It was during the Java training that I started attending some of the extra activities that are organised at Scott Logic. The lunch n’ learns are a relaxed way to hear talks with interesting and diverse themes. These talks have had a wide range of topics such as ‘Expressive Java with Functors and Monads’, ‘History of Technology in 8 Women’, and ‘Using SET Theory to solve Sudoku’. I’ve heard talks on things that I know about and want more information on and also things I’ve never heard of in domains completely new to me.

Another great tradition at Scott Logic are the Communities of Practice. These are groups that self-organise around a specific function, like backend development or testing. They act as a venue for discussion and development within that function. I have found them a great way to listen to the considered wisdom of more senior developers and get an insight into the subjects that they find meaningful and worth pursuing further. They often offer links to methodologies, tools, or ideas that I’ve never heard of or never considered using for myself.

One thing that I’ve learnt from these presentations and workshops is that you should take opportunities to explain what you’re working on and to assist others in your cohort with their work. Knowledge sharing is great for your peers and also helps deepen your own understanding of the topic.

Full Stack Training

After two weeks of working on Java we moved on again to the full stack part of the training. Our frontend is built with Angular, our backend with Spring Boot. By working on both the frontend and backend pieces of the application, we get a comprehensive view of the development of this kind of architecture. Because this is a larger project it took more time to come together into a working application. Each feature takes longer to implement and complete. It was also my first introduction to dependency injection and inversion of control, which took some time to get my head around. Don’t worry about struggling with concepts like these, talk to people and ask for explanations. Plenty of people at Scott Logic are happy to help me correct and refine my understanding of broader concepts.

It was during the full stack training that one of our mentors started organising regular demos. When we are on a project, the client may be curious and want to see our work. To prepare us for this we took part in practice sessions where we showed a small group of peers and mentors the current state of our applications while explaining the changes we had made over the last week.

Two good pieces of advice I was given: have a plan for the demo and show the logical story of a feature. What I found was that the demo often turned into a bit of a Q&A about my website as a whole, rather than just about the feature I was describing. This ended up giving me more feedback and more things to work on, so I thought they were particularly useful.

From this point on, the primary goal of our training was polishing our applications under the guidance of our mentors and tailoring them to our own preferences and desires. Improvements became less earth-shattering and more incremental. Adding one feature at a time to make a more whole application. This is a great time to expand beyond the baseline and explore the aspects of the project you find most interesting.

Presentations and Workshops

Throughout our training we had presentations and workshops with developers and senior developers on a range of topics like Git, Agile, Java language features, and software testing. We also started the grad code series – a fun opportunity for each of us to give our own presentations. Each week has a topic and four or five of us presented on a subtopic. Some of the topics were very broad, each subtopic covering a different programming paradigm, others were narrower, and we were struggling not to cover the same things in each of the week’s talks. I know it’s common to have nerves about giving talks or presentations, but these are very informal and really just an opportunity to create a discussion. As long as you and your group are learning, then everyone is doing great!

To cap off the training programme we did some work in the cloud. For us this was a run through with the AWS cloud offering, getting used to what’s available and how to use it. We set up an example web app and did some Infrastructure as Code with Terraform. It was a nice conclusion to the training that we had been doing over the previous ten weeks. We still have our open source training and design patterns to look forward to but these will happen concurrently with the graduate project we have just begun.

Final Thoughts

Looking back, the time seems to have gone by at lightning speed. Each week we’ve made noticeable improvements on the previous. The contact with mentors helped us improve day by day and our Graduate Coordinator and Training Officer worked hard to keep us on a steady course.

So, that’s my summary of the Scott Logic Graduate Training. It was a great time, I met many people who have similar interests to myself, who have plenty of knowledge, and who are willing to share it. I would tell you that my most important piece of advice is to have fun but that’s trite and overused. Instead, I’ll ask that when you are going through your training you spend some time considering what advice would have been most helpful to you, so you might give it to those who follow in your footsteps.