intive Patronage is an internship program that first started in 2007. It is our unique way to introduce inexperienced people to the world of IT. The program is addressed to students and/or people wishing to change their career path.
Participants receive training in GIT, Scrum, skills specific to web, mobile or software quality engineering. Alongside training, they work intensively with mentors who ensure code quality and good practices in the development process. While interning, they go through the entire software development cycle with the goal of creating a working application.
As we announced a few months ago, the current edition was truly special. For the first time the patronage program took place simultaneously in five cities: Szczecin which is a city where patronage was established over 15 years ago and Wrocław, Poznań, Lublin and Białystok.
It was a huge organizational challenge as well as a great process for many leaders from intive who took care of the program participants. We had 31 remarkable mentors who worked with the interns! So, how did it go? We will report on the results in the following section.
Almost 750 people from all over Poland applied for the latest edition of intive patronage! The applications were all reviewed by the mentors team and after that we had a selection phase. Every person had to solve a task, which was later evaluated by our leaders. These leaders were actively involved in the program from the very beginning. They had an influence on the shape of the group that took part in the internship program. They were introduced to the participants at the recruitment stage, and their support was priceless! We wanted them to help us select people who would later fit in with our values, so that after the program the best of them would join our teams. It was on those basis that we selected the participants. Finally, we enrolled 103 people. The technology groups we formed were JavaScipt, Java, .Net, QA and Android.
The program began with a kickoff in January 2022. Participants started with training sessions and meetings with their group mentors, so to gain knowledge of their core technology, good practices of software development and how to write clean code. Several project teams were formed, and they had to create a fully working application. The teams met many times both remotely and on-site for workshops, mini lectures, working sessions, but also to get to know each other better.
One of the applications was inTiVi which is a simple VOD application containing a movie browser with a breakdown of movie genres, movie details and a login/registration section. The mentors supporting the creation of inTiVi app were developers and testers who develop such applications for clients in the media industry daily. They have tons of experience in VOD apps so they were able to share their domain knowledge with the trainees. The inTiVi app looks like a real VOD product available on the market!
Another application a team created is an e-commerce app, which is a full-stack project. They have created the web part and the REST API server to handle the store, user registration and login. The front-end was created based on NextJS, the CMS panel was created based on React 17, and thanks to the node application, the back end serving REST API was created, which was used by the web application and the Android mobile application. The goal of the mobile team was to deliver the MVP of the mobile application (minimum viable product). And we consider it done!
In the end they created 5 projects; each location created its own thing. Hours of work behind us, hundreds of tasks were solved, but this is still not the end of the patronage program.
The patronage program ended with a closing meeting; participants received certificates of participation with full descriptions of the work they had done, the experience they had gained, and the tools they had learned. However, our efforts did not end there. At that stage we started a recruitment process for intive. Mentors shared their feedback on the participants. The best people were invited to have recruitment meetings so that our managers could get to know them and decide whether they should join our teams. And many of them did! A tremendous success was that the patronage program allowed us to hire over 30 people. We are so happy to welcome them onboard!
One of the participants shared her thoughts with us: “Thanks to the patronage I had the opportunity to see how working in a project looks like in practice, I tested my skills and gained new knowledge. I met inspiring leaders who were helping me at all stages of the project, discovering new perspectives and possibilities. Patronage was also a space for exchanging experiences, views, individual and teamwork. It is certainly incredible to start your adventure in the IT industry and get your dream job. " said Anna Magdzińska - QA Group graduate, and current Junior QA Engineer at intive.
What comes next? Stay tuned and follow us online, because this is not the end of intive Patronage activities. We are proud of our success and are eager for more. We'll announce new editions of the program through our Social Media profiles and we want you onboard.