In 2018 Solvinity opened its doors to young talent with the ambition to continue learning in addition to gaining hands-on practical experience in business. To this end, the organization has joined the Cloud IT Academy, where students follow a dual learning/work trajectory. The dual students gain practical experience by working in an engineering team three days a week and broaden their theoretical knowledge by following the Cyber Security & Cloud Engineer course at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences two days a week.
A short introduction
My name is Cornelis Stuurman and I have been working with the Customer Engineering team Minerva since September 2019. I recently completed the 3rd year of the training and I will start in September with the 4th (and if all goes well), the last year of the training.
What was it like to integrate as a student in a team of working “adults”?
Actually, from the start, I was already involved in various activities for customers. In the first year, it was still hard to find my place within the team and the work that I could pick up. One point that played into this was that my manager did not want to give me too much work in the fear that my study would suffer as a result. This is because for us as students, passing the education is number one and only after that work. Together with Solvinity, I monitor this process closely, so there was also time in busy school periods to attend school during working hours.
From the 2nd year, I really found my place and I have grown enormously in my work. When I started at Solvinity I really only had experience with Windows servers. In the beginning, I mainly took on Linux tasks. Then I went a step further and also learned to work with containers and Kubernetes. After that, I delved more deeply into the public cloud. In short, the activities are very diverse and Solvinity offers plenty of support in learning these new techniques.
Do you have specific habits/rituals within the team?
Yes, we have, whoever makes a mistake should treat! In general, Solvinity doesn’t mind if you make a mistake as long as you fix it yourself and acknowledge the mistake. It is very important within our team that after your mistake, you treat yourself and preferably on sausage rolls, haha!
Which activities or tasks give you the most energy?
I prefer to spend the whole day figuring out and trying new techniques or possibilities. Think, for example, of using a new service in Azure, rolling out environments, automating through Terraform, or building docker files.
What does the coaching in the dual learning/work trajectory look like?
The coaching by Solvinity has always been good. I have a meeting with my manager every two weeks to discuss how things are going at work and school. In addition, there is a pizza session with all Solvinity dual students at the end of each school block. During these sessions, we discuss how the training is going and all this while enjoying pizzas.
