The first months of my apprenticeship at Cloudogu

In 2022, Cloudogu GmbH came up with the plan to become a training company. With me as the first apprentice, this plan then started to be implemented in January 2023. As a career changer, I was of course particularly curious about what to expect and how the training as an application developer would proceed. In this blog post, I look back on my first months of my apprenticeship at Cloudogu.

Familiarization and settling in

My start at Cloudogu went very smoothly and was well structured. A comprehensive familiarization plan was prepared, in which all the important aspects and teams at Cloudogu were introduced step by step. In particular, the get-to-know-you meetings with the individual teams, which take place alongside the on-the-job training, gave me a great opportunity to meet all my new colleagues. This allowed me to get a good overview of the teams and their members, even with the remote-first approach. In addition, the company has a buddy system. This means that all new employees are assigned a buddy who is available to answer questions and welcome new employees. Of course, I also had a buddy who greeted me on my first day in the office. He showed me around, gave me tips and presented me with my own Cloudogu hoodie, which all employees receive, after my first three months. This made me feel well looked after during the job familiarization phase and not left to my own devices.

Apprenticeship at Cloudogu

I spent most of my apprenticeship in a development team from day one. Nonetheless, I also had the opportunity to visit the other teams during my apprenticeship and work there for a few weeks. This was a great way to broaden my horizons and learn about topics that are otherwise not covered much during the apprenticeship. At Cloudogu, these topics include areas such as system integration or IT coaching and training.

I particularly like the fact that you are directly integrated into the development team from the outset, i.e. I was directly involved in all team meetings and, as far as possible, was able to shadow team members and work on tasks with them. This normally happens in pair programming, which means that I program together with an experienced developer. This allowed me to quickly gain my first experiences in the day-to-day work, but at the same time I had support to gain practical experience alongside the independent exercises. In addition, you get to know different working methods and techniques through the various team members. I also have the opportunity to get to know different programming languages, such as Java, TypeScript or Go, at Cloudogu. But the training also comes with some challenges. Especially at the beginning, I learned a lot of new things and had to adapt to a lot, but thanks to the individual support, it was easy to master.

As the company's first apprentice, it's obviously not just a learning process for me, but for everyone involved. It's often a matter of trial and error because not all processes have been fully developed and established yet. To address obstacles and see where the process can still be improved, there are regular feedback meetings with the instructor, manager and other people involved in the process. However, everyone involved approaches this very openly and is always willing to try out or change things.

The daily routine at Cloudogu

The willingness to learn is not only evident in the apprenticeship program, but also in the entire company. Cloudogu is a modern company that sees itself as a learning organization and is always open to new ideas and improvements. One of these improvements is the option to work from home. Cloudogu has introduced a remote-first approach. This applies to all employees, as well as apprentices and working students. For me, this means that I work from home as needed and mainly come to the office for meetings, for example with my instructor, or for events such as workshops. However, this approach is not a must, so I can decide for myself how I want to work. However, when I am in the office, I can still meet colleagues from different teams, with whom I can then have a coffee or lunch in the lounge. Together with the company events, the social aspect is not neglected either. For remote work, we use a kind of virtual office in our team with the help of the software HyHyve, so that you can see who is currently available and simply go to their virtual desk, for example to ask questions. My apprenticeship was very diverse and challenging, and not just in the first few months. I'm looking forward to continuing my education and am excited to see where the journey will take me.