AWARD-WINNING CHARLIE HAS PLANS TO GO ON TO A DEGREE APPRENTICESHIP

Charlie Giddens is an apprentice software developer at Worldline, a leading company in secure payments and transactions. Charlie secured the highly-sought-after apprenticeship after a rigorous selection process and immediately after his GCSEs in June, Charlie travelled to Nottingham for his first week of training. Charlie, a former student leader, was awarded the John Blenkiron apprenticeship cup at our presentation evening in recognition of his determination and motivation.

We were delighted to catch up with Charlie and find out more about his role at Worldline.

Charlie said: “I work as a software developer in a team including a few other apprentices, but soon we are all scheduled to join larger official teams and work on official production software. My local office is at Faverdale, in Darlington, but we have 40% remote working so I do two days at home. I don’t go to college as it is all based online, with occasional live modules on the different topics of the course (there are five over the twelve months of learning in the course). The actual apprenticeship study work consists of pre-learning of each module, work to complete during the lectures and then finally an activity where you apply what you have learned in a piece of software to go into your portfolio.

“It’s engaging and interesting especially now that I am interacting with industry-level software and understanding legitimate practices in the job, as well as working on an actual live piece of software that people in the real world rely on. I am planning to take the apprenticeship up to a full bachelor’s degree/level 7 apprenticeship which, if I manage to do it, will finish some time in 2027.”

You can find out more about Worldline here.