Graduates taught Scala to help placements by major UK employment agency

A major UK graduate employment agency requested help from JBI to train some graduates, which the recruiters were hoping to place in the software engineering field, in Scala programming language.

Scala is a slightly complex programming language that ultimately writes succinct and high quality code that has enhanced performance. Therefore, the graduates who have learnt Scala will be better fit to be recruited because they can cope with complexity in software development and will also be able to learn easier programming languages faster. Scala is an extremely flexible general purpose programming language is often used in conjuncture with other back end development languages. One of the languages that Scala has strong interoperability with is Java and therefore makes Scala an attractive language for recruiters in tech firms. Scala has also gained prominence amongst many of the social media and tech giants, for example LinkedIn and Twitter both use Scala for their search engines, whilst Netflix utilises Scala for their machine learning algorithms in their search engine and recommendations that is a cornerstone for Netflix success as a streaming platform. Moreover, companies such as Airbnb use Scala for their financial reporting and cash flow because it is a fantastic language for scaling without sacrificing performance. These variety of uses provide evidence as to why employment agencies are interested in graduates learning Scala to place them as software developers.

In consultation with the employment agency, JBI curated a three day Scala training course, which was tailored to the potential locations of placements the graduates may land. This lead to diverse and engaging exercises and demonstrations to educate the graduates. To lead this course an instructor with high technical competence and excellent communication skills was required because they had to deal with varied technical levels of the graduates. This was solved on the fly by the instructor by pairing strong and weak delegates in a mentor system and extending labs to challenge the stronger delegates. The recruitment company wanted to put in place certain objectives to ensure that the graduates were sufficiently skilled in Scala:

• Gain an introduction and overview of Scala
• Define object oriented programming within Scala and understand its uses
• Gain an understanding of functional programming with Scala
• Develop a working understanding of Scala features; collections, exceptions, types, functional concurrency

The training course took place remotely in the offices of the employment agency and was received positively by the graduates who attended. The course was considered a success by both JBI and the recruitment firm who were able to place the majority of the graduates.

“Really clear instructor, very well organised and methodical. Took into account the different needs of the attendees. Excellent content, covered more than I expected. The practical exercises were really helpful.” CR, Graduate Software Engineer

“The course exceeded my expectations, the instructor ran through everything from simple to more complicated terminology, made digestible and to my surprise, easy to understand - learning in a pace that was very well suited for me.” TS, Graduate Software Engineer

For further information, please see below;

Scala training course

Scala design patterns workshop

Akka training course

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