Alex Smith: My time working on placement at Shape

During my final year at University, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of weeks on placement at Shape, and I'm so glad I did.

Arriving

When I arrived I got the rundown from Andy - First of all, he assured me that they had a laid back atmosphere at Shape, I could listen to music, I wouldn't be questioned for going on my phone etc. Then he told me he was going to give me a website to work on. I thought I'd be shadowing and brewing up so I liked it immediately.

The work involved building a website that had already been designed. This was split into two parts; coding up the front-end using html, css etc. and then connecting it to the Craft CMS back-end. Tom was there to show me how to do everything and fix all my mistakes (sorry).

The Experience

My time at Shape was by far the most important learning experience from my entire stint at university. Not only from a technical point of view but also seeing how they communicate and how they attentively deal with customers for example -- Tom was always making individual video tutorials for customers' ready for handover of their website. This attention to detail was something I hadn’t even considered in the web development business.

Another important part of the experience for me was being given my own project to work on. It meant that Shape valued me and really wanted to help me learn from my time spent there.

Aside from the work, the environment that Andy and Jason have created at Shape is great. There's a brilliant sense of friendship - We played the Monopoly card game every lunch time with their custom rules (as if it wasn't hard enough).

I'd bet on Shape to get the job done and have fun doing it. I don't think you can say that about a lot of places.