Paulo Figueiredo

• Year of graduation: 2023
• Current workplace: Barclays plc
• Industry sector: Banking

Before applying to the University of Northampton, I investigated all the classes and technologies I would learn through the course. UON had a large variety of programming language throughout all the years that I felt would teach me the vital concepts of the programming industry. From there, I would then decide which technology and language I enjoyed the most.

I particularly enjoyed the coding related aspects of the course. I’m a very technical person and was keen on the technological side of programming and all the logic involved. I joined the University with no programming background, so it goes to show how much you can learn when you really want to be good at something.

Although other aspects of the course are fundamental in the world of software engineering, such as the lifecycle of software engineering and the documentation aspect, I learned more from the practical aspect of this pathway.

Studying this course provided me with a backbone to start my career, as I previously had no knowledge of the computing world. After my degree, I had enough general knowledge and confidence in myself that I could look for and find a job in this industry.

After completing my degree in 2023, I started working at Barclays with a technology called Appian which I hadn’t learnt at University. I was keen to expand my knowledge of programming and get some experience of how the real software engineering industry works up close. In the future I plan on moving to other more technical technologies, such as Java/Javascript. Hurdles and difficulties will always show up in the everyday life of a programmer, as it’s always about finding the best solution to the problem presented, but at the moment I’m not thinking of any difficulties that may arise and am focused on my current position and what I can do daily to improve myself, as this will build a range of skills I can use in the future.

The skills and knowledge gained on my degree that are most useful in my current role are teamwork, communication and stakeholder communication, as well as the importance of consistency, programming syntax, and programming logic.

The advice I would give to undergraduates interested in this career path would be to say the fact that you show some interest in the industry is enough – you don’t need any previous experience in programming. This is a degree that will never get boring – there’s always new technologies arising!

In my eyes, my time at UON was a very underrated experience – I extracted a lot from my time there.