Futurice Academy

Futurice Academy is a special paid training program in addition to our regular summer internship in Helsinki and Tampere. This program is currently for students and career changers who would like to work in our offices in Finland. We’ve just completed our selection process for the current application period and a team of fantastic students will be with Futurice Academy from January to April 2022.

Interested in applying? Stay tuned for more information about the next application period! In the meanwhile, we are publishing below the content of our program description and FAQ from the now closed call for applications of October 2021, so you can learn more and prepare for the next round.

The basics of Futurice Academy

Academy was founded to enable a kick-start for graduates or career changers' developer or data engineer career journey. What a better way to do that than gaining experience in building digital products at one of Finland’s leading digital engineering and innovation companies?

Four-month-long Academy period consists of project work either in one of our external client projects or in an internal development project - or perhaps a bit of both. Location can be either Tampere or Helsinki and one can work full-time or part-time. All participants will be working alongside an experienced cross-disciplinary team to learn the craft of modern software consulting.

As part of the program, the participants will be mentored by a senior Futurician to maximize learning and professional growth and to ensure getting the most out of the learning journey at Futurice. Based on the defined learning goals and interest areas, participants can choose one of our learning tracks:

• Full-stack software development in cloud native environment;
• Data Specialist in cloud native environment;

The program also entails earning one of the cloud vendor certifications with the help of our certification program.

On top of mentoring, learning and interesting projects, the participants get to network with our active international Slack community, attend in our onboarding events, and enjoy a wide list of Futurice provided benefits. There will also be a possibility to continue the Futurice journey after the Academy period. Many of our previous trainees have stayed with us or returned to Futurice later in their career. Read more about their experiences in our blog: 20+ quotes about being an intern at Futurice.

Here’s a short checklist to help interested applicants figure out whether we are a match for each other

• You have some experience in 1) developing for web or mobile platforms or 2) data science, analytics or data-driven development projects. Either or we'd like to see what you've created.
• You graduate soon or are changing your professional career.
• You have a passion to learn more about software development or data science and engineering, and aspire to become a solid professional in the field.
• You are fluent in English, and if you also master Finnish that’s a plus.

We don’t expect anyone to know everything beforehand, the main expectation for is willingness and ability to learn a lot. Interested in applying? Stay tuned for more information about the next application period!

FAQ

Q: Can I work part-time or is this only a full-time position?

You can work part-time, but we expect you to work at least three days a week.

Q: What happens after the Academy period?

There is a chance to continue your Futurice journey after the trainee period.

Q: Is there a remote work option?

Office location is in Tampere or Helsinki. We have a hybrid working mode depending on the team, so occasional work from home might be possible. We don’t offer relocation or remote work opportunities outside Finland.

Q: Is the homework assignment mandatory?

No. But we expect to see some of your past projects before the interviews, so we want to give everyone a chance to demonstrate their skill set. We recommend doing the assignment if there is no other project available to share with us. We use your project(s) or assignment as part of the assessment process when we decide who we select to the interview-round.

Q: Do I have to send a transcript of my studies? Is it mandatory?

Transcript is not mandatory. We give you the option to send a transcript of your studies if you feel that it gives relevant additional information about your skill set that you can’t otherwise provide. As we welcome people with different backgrounds to apply to our Academy program, consider your own situation. The minimum application document requirements are CV, cover letter and project or homework assignment.

Q: What do you mean with “some experience”?

We hope you already had a chance to apply your software development or data specialist skills in some projects. It can be a school or a hobby project or maybe even some real project from your past internships.

Q: What is the time allocation between training and project work?

Most of the learning happens in projects. Of course the situation is different between the projects, but we expect you to spend at least 30% of your time on various training activities if you will join Futurice Academy full time.

Q: What is the Homework assignment? How can I return it with my application?

If you don't have an existing project to share, don't worry. Here's an idea for a project that you can build to showcase your skills in your favorite tech stack:

A lot of modern development on web and mobile is built around using APIs to get, analyze and display data. GitHub's REST API offers a public interface to users, repositories and projects in GitHub. What we'd like you to do, is to build a small app that utilizes that API: it could be a portfolio-style web application to showcase user's or organization's repositories, a mobile app to follow open source project's pull requests, or a machine learning service predicting amount of contributions to a particular project, or even an interactive Power BI report with AI module and imaginative visualization. Surprise us with your creativity but keep in mind that you don’t need to create a full blown service. Pick a few interesting features and focus on the quality of the solution. You shouldn't spend more than a few hours or evenings on this. Imagine you would need to continue developing and maintaining that application for a while and consider that other people might need to work with your code (including us as reviewers). Choice of technologies, architecture of your solution etc. are entirely up to you. Once you are ready, please provide the source code of the application and a short explanation, e.g. in a Github repository.