The Version 1 Digital Academy
Version 1's Digital Academy focuses on the key elements underpinning our strategy for growth for 2021 and beyond.
The Digital Academy is a proven talent accelerator where our engineers learn new skills to better leverage their prior knowledge, and those who are just starting out on their career are offered an opportunity to quickly advance. The Academy, proudly sponsored by Skillnet Ireland, is an intensive 8-week long curriculum and comprises of a series of classroom sessions, lunch and learn seminars, online learning, and practical hands-on workshops. Covering 4 main modules, participants learn about the Version 1 approach to service design and user experience, understand agile ways of working, learn how to deliver on our commitment to engineering excellence and manage modern software development projects effectively through tooling and automation.
The Academy aims to be of benefit to all: from our graduates right through to our senior professionals, the course provides relevant, up-to-date skillsets and gives our people the opportunity to work on cutting edge technology solutions. A key focus of the course is to distil the core components of these modern ways of working into understandable, quantifiable ways of working, making sure that fundamentals are understood through practical, hands-on learning. The Academy’s approach also layers practical, real-world applications on top of the philosophies of these methodologies, ensuring that our people get a well-rounded understanding of the needs of our customers and how to solve their technology problems.
Service Design and User Experience
Agile Ways
of Working
Engineering Excellence
Tooling and Automation
Service Design and User Experience
Topic 1: Research: Understanding User Needs
Topic 2: Designing Great Services Through Design Thinking
Topic 3: The Economic Case for Good Design
Topic 4: The Version 1 Approach To Discovery
Agile Ways of Working
Topic 1: A History of Agile and Its Underlying Philosophy
Topic 2: Scrum Theory and Principle
Topic 3: Behaviour Driven Development
Topic 4: Version 1's Approach to Agile Software Project Delivery
Engineering Excellence
Topic 1: Pragmatic Programming
Topic 2: Cloud-Native Design Patterns
Topic 3: Test Automation as a First-Class Citizen
Topic 4: Dev-Sec-Ops: Creating a 'Security as a Code' Culture
Tooling and Automation
Topic 1: Creating and Managing An Agile Project Through Azure Boards
Topic 2: Source Code Version Control Through Azure Repos
Topic 3: Continuous and Progressive Delivery Patterns With Azure Pipelines and Artifacts
Topic 4: Testing and Shipping With Confidence Using Azure Test Plans
2020 Graduation
Our latest Academy intake on their virtual Graduation day in August 2020. Kyle Downey, a member of the winning team project for this intake, had this to say about the course:
“The Digital Academy was a great experience and learning opportunity for me to enhance my digital skillset. It provided a great pathway for understanding how we help our customers from initial contact, right through to support. As part of the Academy, I learnt more about User Experience and User Interface design and why it’s important to fully understand your customer/end user before you embark on building anything; I also gained valuable development skills and learnt more about using technologies such as git and Azure. I was able to put all of this together in a working demonstration through eliciting requirements, developing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and deploying to the Azure Cloud via Continuous Integration & Deployment.
Overall, I would highly recommend the Academy to anyone looking to improve and refine their skills for delivering top services to our customers.”
