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 very 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.

This year, we offered a three-day placement for a SEND student through our partnership with Greenbank College, offering an accessible work placement for a young person who may face additional barriers gaining early-stage opportunities. Alongside this, through our partnership with Movement to Work who are a charity supporting NEET young people into employment, we’re excited to be opening our work experience up to young people who are NEET.

The value of our offer

After a week at Harker, our placements leave with a strong understanding of how a software team collaborates day-to-day, in addition to developing a software project to fit a business brief. The code they write belongs to them, they can add it to a portfolio and talk about it in future applications or interviews. Furthermore, we offer an employability workshop to support students with improving their CV, starting a LinkedIn profile, or learning more about how to write a strong job application.

At the end of their placement, the student presents their work back to the team, which is a nice way to celebrate their achievement whilst also giving them experience with writing and delivering a presentation. A highlight of the programme is seeing the young person’s confidence increase rapidly over just a single week.

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 (we were thrilled to receive over 60 applications this year from across the Liverpool City Region!). We encourage all local businesses in our network to get involved with the Careers Hub to see how they can offer meaningful opportunities to young people.

Don’t just take our word for it

Ini, a student at University of Liverpool Maths School, said:

I really enjoyed being able to focus on one project for a large amount of time to familiarise myself with what I was dealing with and how to approach it. I felt this made the process a lot more comfortable. I also enjoyed learning the new coding languages. It gave me some insight into what backend development is like which is relevant to my aspirations to study computer science and also taught me PHP and JSX which will also be handy.

Jake, a student at University of Liverpool Maths School, said:

The project work was so much fun, I really enjoyed the process of creating both the backend and frontend systems. I also really liked feeling like part of the team for the week, and everyone was really welcoming and helpful the whole time so it just created a very enjoyable environment to work in. This has definitely solidified for me that I want to get into software development, because I really enjoyed learning about how to create databases and webpages, and had lots of fun coding and problem solving each day. Getting to join all the meetings showed me a lot about the types of roles I would have if I were to work somewhere similar to here and so I found them to be a very useful experience, and talking to people about degree apprenticeships and interviews has been very helpful too.

Levi, a student at Greenbank College, said:

I enjoyed meeting the team and working on the project. I think this will help me understand how office work will go when I work for a company. Everything was all great!

Interested?

If you’re a KS5 student (or NEET and aged 25 or under) and you’re looking for work experience in software development and you like the sound of our work experience, check out our informational page and submit an early application for summer 2027 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. We regularly visit schools and colleges to discuss our entrepreneurial journey and our mission to use software to tackle homelessness, which offers a different perspective compared to typical corporate talks.