Placements at Harker

As a purpose-led start-up, we want everything we do to be truly meaningful and impactful, rather than doing things for the sake of a checkbox exercise. This extends to our work experience offer, which is something our team is passionate about, given the youthful nature of our team as a group of students and recent graduates.

Rather than fetching cups of tea, we task our placements with creating their own software project with a full brief and guidance, along with support from our full-time software developers. Placement students develop the backend for a fictitious staff achievement system in PHP, and students who finish early are given the frontend development as an extension. Alongside this, students are invited to sit-in on some of our team meetings, including our daily software stand-up meetings and weekly technical team meeting.

The value of our offer

Students often walk away with an increased confidence in software development, new knowledge on industry-wide tools such as GitHub, an ability to develop a project to a brief, and a better understanding of the day-to-day work of a developer.

We’re proud of offering such a meaningful and hands-on work experience placement as a start-up, leveraging our small nature to give a greater insight into how our team operates, which might be closed off to students at a larger corporation. Thanks to the LCR Careers Hub, we’ve been able to expand our offer this year much wider and reach more students, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with their team in the future as part of their Employers Network.

Don’t just take our word for it

Xander, a student at College@Deyes 6th Form, when asked ‘What did you enjoy about the placement and why?’ said:

Just feeling like I belonged within the team for the week, everyone was so welcoming and friendly, no fetching teas, just being given appropriate work. Not feeling left out, included within important meetings and allowed to contribute where I felt comfortable.

Isla, a student from University of Liverpool Maths School, said:

I do think this experience will help my career as, along with of course looking good on a CV, I believe this experience has given me a sense of confidence when it comes to working in an office, for a team.

Sean, a student from Greenbank College, said:

I have no doubt at all that this opportunity has given me a fantastic boost towards my understanding of a live coding work environment. This also links in really well with the jobs I have a strong interest in.

Mohamed, a student from Liverpool Life Science UTC, said:

I really enjoyed the placement as the environment I worked in made me feel like a professional software developer. I enjoyed be part of the stand up meetings as I was able to learn a lot from it such as how teams work in and some methods they used.

Harry, a student from The Blue Coat School, said:

I learnt a lot about backend while working on the project including knowledge like migration and pivot tables, while also developing programming skills like unit testing. Moreover I experienced first hand the software development cycles such as the use of tickets on Jira and daily stand up meetings and what is involved in such meetings.

Interested?

If you’re a KS5 student looking for work experience for summer 2026 and you like the sound of work experience here, check out our informational page and submit an early application here!

If you work in a school or college, and think your students would benefit from hearing about Harker and what we do, drop us a line.