What might a Developer Placement Year at Majestic look like?
We typically offer twelve months experience working at Majestic, helping us maintain and develop majestic.com - our link intelligence website.
We have a strong relationship with local student societies; we sponsor hackathons, run workshops, and provide talks to student run groups. We have often found fostering these relationships allows us to engage with students who will excel during our placement year and beyond.
In the past we have offered the opportunity to work closely with our team of developers, who provided mentoring, advice, regular code reviews and feedback. We treat our placement students as professionals – their opinions are listened to and they are a part of discussions on how we move forward as a business.
As developers at Majestic, our placement students are exploring the whole range of the business. From a product’s inception, through the development process, all the way to release. This process involves interacting with lots of different employees, with different skill levels, skill sets, and roles within the company. We always aim to provide every placement student with the opportunity to explore many different aspects of the business, as we believe this well facilitates you becoming a valuable professional.
Testimonies
“I did not expect to be as involved with the company as I currently am. Majestic has given me the opportunity to work on different parts of the site with my changes going live. In my short time here, I have learnt so much and know the quality of my code has improved through all the feedback received from different members of the team. Everyone has been supportive and made my start here very enjoyable, making me love what I do."
-Miraj (Placement Student 2019)
“At the beginning of my placement year, I was assigned a placement supervisor, who also acted as my line manager. Having barely used Perl or Java for a piece of software, I found myself asking a lot of questions. The team was incredibly receptive to my queries. If they didn’t know the answer, they always tried to give what they thought might be a good direction to explore. I was given several tutorials on the structure of the in-house software by some of the senior developers during my first week to help me get up to speed. Over time, I was able to ask less and less questions as I became more familiar with my role and the languages.
One of my main projects was a solo research development project trying to solve a specific internal development use case. The project combined self-management, software design and implementing the full-stack of software. I was assigned a supervisor who guided me through the best ways to manage my own time and design a maintainable architecture. At the end of the project, I was asked to give a demonstration to the senior staff. I am usually quite a calm public speaker, but during a practice session with my supervisor, I lost my cool. It took quite a few practise sessions, but, with the right guidance, I got myself back on track. A week later, I was able to give a concise yet informative demonstration of my work.”
-Beth (Placement Student 2017)
“My Majestic placement year was an absolute pleasure in which I got a real taste of working in development. I was a real contributor to a team making valuable software, all the while feeling adequately challenged and well supported. The size and structure of the company provided me with ample opportunity to gain insight into how and where day to day activities translate, directly or otherwise, to business value and by the end, I felt like I'd properly stepped into being a software professional.”
-Callum (Placement Student 2016)
How do I find out more?
As an SME, we don't tend to advertise our available roles heavily. A lot of our applicants find out about our roles through events we are involved in. Should you wish to apply for a placement year with us we encourage you to work with your university to contact us about any roles that may be available.