We launched our Graduate programme in June 2022, and oh, what a brilliant, productive, and fulfilling experience it has been so far!
We are proud to be working with talented graduates who have extraordinary energy and drive and who bring innovative ideas into our community here at Tyk.
Here’s everything you need to know about the programme and our progress.
Where is our graduate programme based?
We recently opened an office in London, Ontario, so it made sense to continue investing in our employee base in Canada – the graduate team has had exposure to Canadian clients alongside working with the team across North America.
London, in particular, has an extensive graduate community with Western University and Fanshawe college nearby.
How did we choose who to bring into the program?
We launched the programme with three graduates hired to work in the business’s Customer Ops/Commercial teams.
We were looking for graduates with computer science experience OR early career professionals with knowledge they’d be able to leverage at Tyk – we’re a bit different in that we’re willing to hire individuals who might have started out on a different path.
Here are a couple of our recent hires:
- Someone who was previously a web developer (with a computer science degree) who wanted to extend their technical knowledge
- Someone who hadn’t worked in tech before but had completed a development boot camp and worked in many different customer-facing roles.
In line with our remote-first way of working, we hired everyone remotely! We did choose to meet in London for the first week of the programme to set the scene and get everyone aligned.
Meeting the grads for the first time in London, Ontario!
How did we structure the program?
Our graduate programme runs for 12 months with clear goals and outcomes for graduate employees to achieve. This programme is a test and learn for us at Tyk; we wanted to run an initial programme and gather some feedback and learnings before opening up something at scale.
This is why we initially chose to focus the graduates on customer operations and commercial departments – we are regularly hiring in these areas, and it made sense for us to prioritise the programme for these departments.
For the graduates, it also gives them the benefit of a ton of exposure to customers, customer-facing engineers within the business and a large variety of tasks and processes to contend with.
The plan was for the team to come in, spend three months learning about the Tyk platform and then rotate around customer-facing departments in the business; pre-sales solutions architecture, customer solutions architecture (customer success) and customer support.
What’s happened in the first six months?
The graduates spent their first three months learning about the Tyk stack and dependencies, and in month three kicked off their first major project – creating a Twitter clone for the team to use in pre-sales demos with prospective clients.
The team learned to deploy a Tyk demo, preparing them for pre-sales work, did internal demos and also created a ton of content:
They’ve also upskilled by completing relevant Docker, Kubernetes and MongoDB courses.
We’re heading towards the last six months of the programme, and we’ve decided to pivot a bit from our initial plan of having them rotate around various customer-facing teams in the business.
What’s the plan for the next six months?
The team has been exposed to a wide range of departments within the company to get a sense of where they’d like to end up after the programme if a role is available. Over the next three to six months, we plan to give the graduates more exposure to their areas of interest while allowing them to collaborate with departments that weren’t originally in scope.
In December and January, the team will work with Product and Engineering and do some coding and development for our core product.
Some graduates will focus more on pre-sales and solution architecture, while others will look at the business’s marketing and operational areas. Alongside working in specific departments, we’ll continue technical upskilling with courses and certifications.
Kudos is deserved to the graduate team for working hard throughout the programme and leaning into Tyk’s culture of asynchronous working. Firas Aboushamalah, Monica Cedeno and David Le – well done!
Also worth giving a shoutout to our Director Solutions Architecture, Americas – Sedky, for guiding these folks through our technical onboarding and being a key figure in their success so far.
Looking to the future
We’re hoping to run more graduate programmes in the future, ideally with a broader scope giving more agency to other teams in the business to bring in their own grads.
We also want to extend the programme to run in different regions we operate in, EMEA, APAC and the US.
For now, we’ve still got six months left of the current programme, and we’re hoping to see some more great results from the team – at that point, we’ll figure out what we plan to do moving forward.
Graduates, 2023 – you’ve got this!
