Industrial
Placement
Industrial Placement Scheme
We provide a 12 month placement offering IT/Computer Science undergraduates the opportunity to work within various development teams in order to develop skills and knowledge of our full product suite in order to gain an appreciation of how Development functions as a whole.
Should you perform well and enjoy working for us, there is the potential to be offered a permanent position at the end of your placement to join us upon graduation on our Graduate Development Programme. After completion of the Graduate Programme you will have gained skills and knowledge in various areas both technical and non-technical . This will give you a solid grounding from which to further develop your career in Ultra in a specialised role.
Training
Ultra has a learning culture and engineers are encouraged to spend time improving themselves technically. To enable this placement students are given access to Pluralsight and Code School which provide on demand high quality training in order to allow engineers to keep up to date with the latest technologies in their field and also cross-train into areas they have an interest in.
Support
Students are paired with “buddies” who will have recently completed a graduate role themselves. These buddies will be the first point of contact for support and guidance during the placement. You will also receive regular one to one’s with your line manager who will ensure you are set objectives and given feedback regularly so you can monitor your own progress and development.
If you are interested in applying for a placement with us, please submit your CV and covering letter to hr.recruitment@ultra-as.com. Following an initial telephone interview, successful applicants will be invited to attend an assessment centre at our offices in Wythenshawe, Manchester.
Places for 2018 are now full and we will be accepting applications for placements in 2019 from September onwards. Assessment centres will be held between October 2018 and March 2018.
Industrial Placement Profile
I studied electrical and electronic engineering at the Manchester Metropolitan University. This involved a fair bit of programming – loads of MATLAB and Arduino, and a bit of C and Assembly. I really enjoyed the programming aspects of my course, so I decided to apply for a software engineering placement here at Airport Systems.
I was put into the baggage systems team, working mainly on our UltraTrak product. It was a bit strange being put into an office environment, but I was made to feel very welcome by everybody, and was given a placement ‘buddy’ to help me find my feet. Everyone was very approachable, and I feel as though I learned far more in my placement year than I did during my first two years of university. I would strongly recommend that you do a placement year if you get the opportunity to!
I re-joined the baggage systems team after my final year of university. We’ve had some really varied work to do over the past 12 months. I am currently working on implementing a RESTful web service, which is really interesting. It’s a technology I have never used before. However, this isn’t a problem - we all have full access to PluralSight and CodeSchool, which we are allowed to use whenever we like if we feel as though it’ll help us. I particularly love this aspect of working here; it encourages me to work on things I have no previous experience in and pushes me out of my comfort zone. This freedom we get in choosing how we work takes a lot of stress out of the job. Also, every Friday (deadlines permitting) we have continuous improvement. This is an opportunity to improve either yourself or the product. Recently, I have spent my Friday’s setting up SonarQube, to analyse our source code quality. This led to finding a huge performance issue in our product, and SonarQube even suggested the fix for it, which is now in production.
We’re all encouraged to work on all parts of our technology stack too, so we get to work with numerous technologies. In a typical day I could be developing in CSS/JavaScript/HTML, Java and PL/SQL, which makes for interesting and varied work.
We have set ‘career paths’, which are a kind of template for career progression. Each rank has a set list of knowledge requirements, which is great – this gives us very definite objectives and goals to work to in order to gain promotions. I’m currently working towards my Software Engineer II status, which I hope to achieve at some point this year.
There’s also a thriving sports and social club, which is heavily subsidised. We have days out go-karting, to the cinema and zombie experiences to name a few!
Tom Deakin