Hi, I’m Kasai, a Lead Software Engineer for the Home Office. I currently look after our Emerging Talent in the engineering space and support our people on this programme.
We’re advertising for 12 DevOps Digital Career Programme Associates, on an 18-month contract, across our Croydon, Manchester and Sheffield sites. I want to help you understand more about these roles, what it’s like to work in them and how we recruit.
The Home Office works to build a safe, fair and prosperous UK. As part of this, Home Office Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) designs, builds and develops services for the public, the department and wider government. The scale of our projects is matched only by the opportunities for our people.
We offer competitive starting salaries, a Civil Service Pension with employer contribution rates of at least 26.6%, as well as a range of other brilliant benefits including flexible working and 25 days annual leave on appointment, rising with service.
What does a DevOps Associate do?
This role combines on the job learning and development, with 20% of your time devoted to structured learning.
You’ll work in a small agile team with DevOps, developers, designers, content designers and others, always considering users – who are at the centre of what we do.
You will be responsible for:
- helping to execute test and deployment activities
- working on ways to automate and improve development and release processes
- providing technical support functions, solving challenging platform use and configuration issues
- writing simple automation components (scripts/playbooks) for our platforms
You will also learn about tools and techniques used within the wider team and adopt these in your work every day, and this will be supported by training, coaching and mentoring, helping you develop towards a permanent DevOps role.
Our new applications are containerised and continuously deployed to both cloud and private infrastructure, so we have great opportunities to learn and use DevOps approaches and DevOps toolchains.
During the final 6 months of the programme you will have the opportunity and be supported to apply for a permanent role at either grades HEO Associate Developer/DevOps or SEO Software Developer/DevOps.
Our job adverts spell out exactly what skills and experience are required for the Associate DevOps roles, but we’re looking for individuals who have a keen interest in emerging technologies, good communications skills, can work with diverse teams across multiple locations and can approach challenging problems in a structured manner.
In addition, we are looking for individuals who have worked with Java, Python or JavaScript, or have relevant academic experience. You will also have a basic understanding of good development practices, are committed to writing clear, clean code and improving systems as well as experience of Linux including scripting.
What does an Associate DevOps look like?
There’s no one type of person working at the Home Office. Just like in UK society, everyone’s different. We believe that different backgrounds, perspectives and voices provide richer, fuller thinking that helps us deliver fairer, better outcomes. That’s why we’re committed to creating a welcoming, inclusive workplace where all our people can bring their whole selves to work and perform at their best.
At the Home Office, we’re proud to be one of the most ethnically diverse departments in the Civil Service, a Stonewall Top 100 Workplace Equality Employer and a Social Mobility Foundation Top 75 employer. We work to recruit and retain disabled staff and are a Disability Confident Leader.
How do I apply for a job as an Associate DevOps Digital Career Development Programme?
We strive to make our recruitment fair, open and to appoint only on merit, and as a result, elements of our selection processes can sometimes feel unfamiliar to external candidates, so hopefully it’ll help if I explain how they work. You can find more detail about each stage on the job advert.
Our recruitment process consists of three stages: the application, a coding aptitude test and an interview. In the application, we ask for a CV and a 500-word personal statement – which outlines how you meet the essential criteria, as set out in the advert. For those who pass sift, they’ll be invited to complete a coding test. This test will assess your technical skills and ability to effectively perform in the advertised role. Candidates who reach the required standard in the test will be invited to interview. If you attend an interview with us, we’ll provide you with feedback, regardless of the outcome. We will consider all requests for reasonable adjustments ahead of the aptitude test or interview.
I hope this has given you a bit of an insight into the work of a DevOps Digital Career Development Associate role and how we recruit them. If you’re interested in applying, you can view the full advert on Civil Service Jobs The closing date is 11:55pm on Sunday 3 October 2021.
If you have any questions, you’re very welcome to get in touch with Kat Rudd.
We’ll be sharing stories from colleagues already working in these roles later this week, and will be bringing you more examples of how to apply for different Home Office jobs, at a range of levels, in future. In the meantime, you can check out all our currently advertised vacancies in DDaT on the Civil Service Jobs website.