The Itility Young Professional Program (YPP) helps talented young people to develop and boost their careers. It is designed for ambitious, recently graduated cloud and data enthusiasts who want to grow into an expert in their area of passion. Working as a team through a series of real-world assignments, the program develops both soft skills and technical knowledge. For this blog, we asked Lujaina Abuerban to share her experience in the YPP DevOps Engineer.

My journey started when I arrived in the Netherlands about 5 years ago, to start my studies in Computer Science. After my graduation, I was interested in working with technology as much as interacting with the business side of things. I worked shortly as an IT consultant. This allowed me to bridge that gap from the business side while using my background, but I found it was not hands-on enough for me.

It was time for a new challenge. That is when I learned about the Itility YPP for DevOps Engineering. The program appealed to me since I was very interested in cloud, but had not yet had a chance to work in this field. It would be a great learning opportunity for me.

Learning on the job

During the program you work in a team, and as a team, we interacted with a customer to fulfill their needs. From gathering requirements, to implementation and delivery. Our task was to design and implement a system for cloud resource monitoring.

Bram Mulders, YPP DevOps Engineer: "Coming from a software background, it was unbelievable to find out how you can use cloud building blocks to build great solutions. Not only do you learn everything about what the cloud has to offer, the Itility YPP also prepares you to be successful at a customer."

This project was similar to other projects that Itility’s Cloud Control (ICC) team have implemented. For me, contacting and talking to members of the team was one of the most valuable parts of the program. Learning from their experience and from what they had already accomplished, and applying those insights to our solution ourselves. This illustrates that Itility believes in learning on the job, with our coach — acting as the customer — giving feedback on the things we could improve.

As cloud providers have a wide array of products they provide, the difficulty comes in choosing which provider to use, for which service, and why. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud often deliver products which have a similar functionality but with minor differences. Comparing these tools to each other to fit the customer’s requirements was extremely interesting. It is like building Legos: all the pieces are there, you just have to figure out how they connect to make the final shape you have in mind.

Coaching and training

Throughout the program, we were assigned a dedicated coach who guided us along the way. From using the Scrum way of working to conducting meetings with clients. Knowing how to talk to customers, is as important as your technical skills. Our coach helped tremendously by sharing his experience, providing information on best practices, and answering our questions. This is great for learning: working closely with someone who has hands-on experience and immediately applying your new knowledge in the field. This helped us grow, both as a team and individually, throughout the time in the program.

Lucas Mestrom, YPP DevOps Engineer: "What I really liked about the Young Professional Program was the amount of freedom you had. It allowed you to deep-dive into topics that you deemed as interesting and of value to the customer. This was also really encouraged by a ‘think outside of the box’ mentality within the rest of Itility."

After the YPP

After finishing the program, I started my first customer project as a fully skilled Itilian. I joined the customer team as a cloud engineer, working hands-on with technology to create new business value. Looking back, my skills and knowledge have grown substantially during the YPP. A great way to develop myself and give my cloud career a boost.

Our Young Professional DevOps Engineer Program has multiple starting dates throughout the year. Have you recently finished a technical Master’s or Bachelor’s degree — or are you about to — and are you interested to join up? Check out our careers site or contact us to see if there is a spot left in the next.