Internship: The Training Manager’s View

“Successful interns are able to slip into our development process and become productive very quickly”.

Alain (pronounced Alan) has been with KRS for over 7 years, is a Microsoft Certified IT Professional for Database Development, has a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree from Wits, and is very proud to have produced a new batch of highly qualified interns for 2014.

“Training has always been high on the agenda at KRS and a few years ago, we identified a need that university or college graduates where joining the company with lots of theoretical knowledge but very little practical experience. We thus started the internship program to take graduates and put them through an intensive training program to give them experience and to let them see what happens is a development house and how a system is actually developed.

Test Driven Development and Domain Driven Design

The internship program has the objective of producing a usable system at the end of the six weeks. We start off by introducing them to the agile development process specifically working in scrum teams. There is also a big emphasis on Test Driven Development and Domain Driven Design. These are the main principles that we use in the development of software and it is very important to get these concepts bedded down early.

Every year brings different challenges to the internship as there are different personalities along with a variety of skills and exposure due to the wide variety of source of students. This makes each and every course unique with different highlights as the contents of the course change to meet the new demands of the industry and ever-changing technology.

At the end of the course, the interns all have 6 weeks experience and those that we have hired, are able to slip into our development process and become productive very quickly as a large portion of the learning curve is already completed.”