DevOps Cloud Engineer Apprenticeship
What is a DevOps Cloud Engineer Apprenticeship?
Apprenticeship.gov defines an apprenticeship as, “An industry-driven, high-quality career pathway where employers can develop and prepare their future workforce, and individuals can obtain paid work experience, classroom instruction, and a nationally-recognized, portable credential.”
Our apprenticeship program in DevOps cloud engineering trains apprentices in network programming, Iaas in cloud environments, CI/CD, and cloud-related specializations. We use a learning-by-doing approach and programs mirror on-the-job requirements.
Why Run an Apprenticeship?
What you will be doing throughout the program.
Get Talent with the Specific Skills You Need
Not all technical skills are equal. Apprenticeships through Qwasar are customizable to your specific needs. Work with our Learning Engineers to create a pipeline of talent with specific skills, such as embedded engineering, compilers, C++, Rust, or even Rust for gaming or C++ for autonomous driving.
Build A Diverse Pipeline
Apprenticeships are a great way to gain diverse talent through an accessible program that allows all learners to gain high quality technical education. Bridge the gap between degrees or training programs and entry-level jobs while increasing the diversity of your talent pool and workforce.
Decrease Costs
Lower costs of recruiting and sourcing qualified talent. Find interested and invested candidates without a skills gap and provide them with a career on-ramp.
Consistency and Cadence of Hiring
Generate a pipeline of talent when you need it over the entire year. Plan cohort start dates around your key hiring times and meet growth requirements.
Improve Productivity and create an overall more profitable workforce
Training workers who are dedicated and committed to your company and already have the skills needed to be successful. Engineering managers spend less time training and instructing apprentices and more time completing projects.
Minimize Liability Costs and Uncertainty
Skills-based training and hiring decreases uncertainty in your candidates. Have confidence your pipeline is up to scratch and able to start contributing on Day 1 to your engineering organization and teams. There is little room for error or liability with this direct route.
Did you know?
Over 150,000 businesses have integrated the apprenticeship model into their talent development strategy. Source
How Apprenticeships Feed Your Talent Pipelines
Cloud bootcamps often aren’t rigorous enough in their training and their curriculum skips vital fundamentals in software engineering, such that many graduates don’t make it into apprenticeships, internships, or entry-level jobs. There can be a mis-alignment of needed skills too.
Our apprenticeships can feed your talent pipelines and provide a key opportunity for potential candidates to train in the specific skill set you need, while also bringing capable diverse candidates.
How a DevOps Cloud Engineer Apprenticeship Program Works
The specific languages and skills acquired during the technical training period are customizable depending on the most pertinent need at your company. Here’s how apprenticeship programs generally work with Qwasar:
Costs
Companies pay a recruitment fee or a training fee. Companies pay apprentice salaries which are staged based on apprentice competency, starting at 50% for the first 6 months.
Location
Training is entirely remote and online. Learners complete the training on their own devices from home.
Cohorts
Cohorts are full-time, like a job. Start dates are set based on your hiring needs and cycles.
Responsibilities
Apprenticeships are a collaboration between us and your company.
What You Do
- Announce the Apprenticeship program publicly, promote on social
- Onboard apprentices like you do new employees after they complete the training period
- Place apprentices into software teams with one assigned SWE who will mentor the apprentice (like a Sr SWE who works with a Mid or Junior Engineer)
- Provide ongoing input on desired skills in apprentices
What We Do
- Advertise and recruit apprentices
- Manage, train, and prepare apprentices during training period and throughout their apprenticeship
- Run daily standups, pair programming, and tea meetings during training periods just like engineers do on the job
- Develop a refined training track if necessary to train in specific skills required for your positions
- Announce the co-branded program
DevOps Cloud Engineer Apprenticeship Curriculum
The initial training period is split into 2 tracks, followed by on-the-job training. On-The-Job training is part of any apprenticeship or internship.
Apprentices will write ~10-30K lines of code during their training period, largely in high-level languages. They will then specialize in the languages/tools of interest to your company. You can also assign a specific project (e.g. a fintech project, a game development project, a project specific to your industry) if you think it’s appropriate to eventually becoming a FTE or providing greater value on the job or on a particular team.
The apprenticeship curriculum is entirely project-based, requires building multiple software projects that respect norms and pass code reviews, and covers:
Low-level Intensive
Specialization
On-The-Job Training
Hard Skills
Terraform, Puppet, Ansible, Chef, AWS/GCP/Azure, Jenkins
Installing databases – SQL, noSQL, Redis
CI/CD
Network programming, code automation in a public IaaS cloud infrastructure
Hard Skills
- Cloud migration and deployment, application migration,
- Disaster recovery,
- Cloud storage,
- OR
- Cloud performance testing.
- Others as necessary
Hard Skills
Ongoing use of cloud-provider specific tools in areas appropriate to your business
Additional subjects not covered during Specialization
Soft Skills
- Use of trial and error
- Determination
- Efficient debugging
- Rigor
- Structured problem solving
- Pair programming
- Self-management
Soft Skills
-
Technical interviews
-
Professional communication
-
Skills customized to client’s needs
Soft Skills
- Technical interviews
- Behavioral interviews
- Resume and LinkedIn profile review
Looking for a specific language or tool that’s not here? Not a problem. Contact us to discuss options.
DevOps Cloud Engineer Apprenticeship Timeline
Qwasar’s DevOps Cloud Engineer Apprenticeship program generally takes 7-19 months to complete in total. Here’s an overview of how long it takes for us to recruit learners, conduct applicant interviews, then produce apprentices who are ready to feed your talent pipelines:
How Learning Works
Learning at Qwasar is based on 21st-century learning models, not on knowledge transfer.
Here’s an overview of how learning works:
Competency-based Education
Mastering the key competencies of low-level programming is at the core of our curriculum. Our learning system is designed around what learners are capable of doing. You cannot progress in your track unless you have fully understood the concept.
Project-based Learning
Students are to complete progressively more difficult and complex software projects that build key hard skills, knowledge, and understanding, as well as soft skills such as problem-solving and creativity. Projects are rigorous, difficult, and require code reviews.
Standups, Meetings, and Pair Programming
We treat apprentices as if they were on our engineering team: they do standups, pair programming, code reviews, discuss architecture together, etc. Apprentices don’t sit in lectures or watch instructor videos: they CODE!
Community
Learning happens in community with fellow students and Qwasar program participants. Our platform builds a supportive learning community to help students own their transition into tech industry roles.
Learning by Doing
Being a software engineer isn’t something you’ll learn by reading a book or watching a video. You need to DO it! Learning by doing has been scientifically proven to be a superior way of learning, but more importantly, it’s a method that simulates the workplace and prepares students for jobs.
High Developer Standards
Learners are expected to deliver projects to professional standards, meaning work is client-ready. We expect this of our learners because you expect this of your employees, and our goal is to train job-ready candidates with the skills to succeed.
What to Expect From Our DevOps Apprentices
- Able to write quality code to a norm that’s readable and maintainable
- Able to give and receive peer code reviews
- Able to pair program and work with/on a team of engineers
- Resourceful when it comes to finding a solution
- Not afraid of tackling a new subject
- Able to learn a new language or tool quickly, on their own
- Able to actively contribute to discussions on software architecture
- At ease using Git and version control systems, including in group/team projects
- Ready to contribute to your engineering team from Day 1
- Competent in internet research techniques
- Able to translate a project description into an architecture, code base, and deployed solution
- Determined problem solvers
- Experience writing code in low-level languages while dealing with trade-offs
What Sets Our Apprenticeship Program Apart From Other Programs
Qwasar runs apprenticeships to provide a pipeline of skilled software talent to various companies, while maintaining affordable programs and attracting learners from a huge variety of backgrounds.
- Flexibility of curriculum, location, and timing
- Actually train to the high entry-level requirements for cloud engineer roles
- Accessibility
- Able to deliver a diverse population without compromising on technical abilities
- High conversion rates of candidates & retention rates years later
- Quality of candidates
- The level we demand of our apprentices, because you demand a high level
- Time spent coding and practicing everything that you’re expected to do on the job
Did you know?
No other apprenticeship provider trains in DevOps Cloud engineering. No one offers real experiential learning with hands-on DevOps projects or extensive use of cloud provider tools. We don’t compromise on the technical level, because you need competent engineers to build your products and infrastructure!
What Sets Us Apart
What makes Qwasar programs different from other tech training options out there? Find out how we stack up.
Recruit From Us
Looking to hire graduates from Qwasar programs? Learn more about recruiting options and how to get involved.