Apprenticeships deliver at Magma Digital

For National Apprenticeship Week, Preston-based Magma Digital recounts its experience of hiring a 16-year-old web developer as an apprentice.

The United Kingdom has been celebrating National Apprenticeship Week. At Magma Digital we were eager to be involved in this week to demonstrate how, from our experience, apprenticeships really can deliver.

We hired Liam, our first web developer apprentice in October 2012.The web industry currently has many difficulties hiring staff of the right calibre, so we decided to support the National Apprenticeship Service and 'Grow our Own' developers.

Liam joined us at 16 after just completing his GCSEs. He was certain that he didn't want to go on to further full time education and end up with large amounts of student debt, so instead he chose an apprenticeship in web development at Magma Digital.

At Magma, we treat all our apprentices and interns just like the other members of staff (with some additional mentoring time), Liam has already joined us at PHP North West 2012 just a few weeks after he joined Magma and will soon be attending the inaugural PHP North East conference in Newcastle. He, along with another eight members of the team, will learn more about the latest technology and innovation in the programming language PHP. Liam said: " I didn't expect to love my job so much that it feels like a new hobby. The fact I can work and learn within a company makes the whole experience so much better than being at college full time. I was instantly treated as part of the family here and with help from the team I have been able to learn and enjoy web development."