Pentest People Apprenticeship Journeys

National Apprenticeship Week 2023 is the 16th annual celebration of apprenticeships. The week brings together businesses and apprentices across the country to shine a light on the positive impact that apprenticeships make to individuals, businesses and the wider economy.

In light of this week, two of our consultants sit down to talk about their career journeys as apprentices. Liam and Ben take us through how they secured their apprenticeships and there reasons behind choosing an apprenticeship route over university.

Bens Journey

Ben, being in his second year of college, found the company through a careers day at his school and applied for the role online afterwards. After achieving his A Levels and a successful application, he joined the consultant team here at Pentest People. Ben is now a fully qualified consultant and sees a future in full time pen-testing. Here are a few comments from Ben about why an apprenticeship better suited him over university:

“In my last year of college, I actually didn’t even submit a UCaaS form. And I was actually planning sort of my first year that I was going to apply for both and I would fall back on it, of course in uni. But again, it was that careers day where Pentest People came in to do a talk where I seriously considered committing to an apprenticeship. And then by the time year 13, rolled around, I was like almost certain and I didn’t want to give myself the option to fall back on uni because had I gone to uni, I think I would have been way more upset at myself, I would have been kicking myself if I had an opportunity for an apprenticeship and I can’t take it because I was at uni. So I’m definitely happy I took the apprenticeship route.

My apprenticeship here at Pentest People is a level four foundation degree, which is, you know, obviously less than a full degree. But this apprenticeship is a lot shorter than a full degree. And we’re getting paid and they get three years experience before any of my peers are gonna finish their university classes. And that’s something that you can’t really get any other way than an apprenticeship. And I think that’s really valuable. And it’s going to be important to me for the rest of my sort of career progression in Pentest People.”

Liams Journey

Liam, who is now a consultant team leader here at Pentest People, came from college also and started with the business as an apprentice over 3 years ago. Liam started programming and worked his way up, ending up being instrumental in the development in our sister company, DarkInvader. Here are a few comments from Liam about his journey:

“So yeah, I started off as an apprentice and Pentest People a number of years ago now. And really, it was just kind of all go from day one, I was very fortunate to have joined the business, it’s quite new. I hadn’t been going that long. So I was able to get stuck in straightaway. I had to, I’d been doing programming all the way through school, which is obviously ended up being quite helpful throughout throughout the apprenticeship. And because of the programming I was doing, I discovered a very early on in my journey, I discovered a vulnerability in a large kind of security platform that was then reported. And at that point, I was then allowed to start performing Web Application Penetration Tests. And those Penetration tests again, again, started off just doing kind of basic vulnerability scanning. And then we we moved our way up. And then I started building or writing new new services, where we were writing custom implementations of various programmes where we were trying to assess how applications responded to load, doing quite a lot of research into how the psychology of the human mind comes in when you’re discussing, or when people are using websites and the load times of them how psychology dictates exactly how they perceive the website to load. Because it doesn’t necessarily matter how quick it is actually loading. As long as it’s under about half a second, the human mind perceives that to be loaded instantly. And we were exploring that that was kind of a big part of my journey there.

Then i wrote a Dark Web scanner as well, which is now on a while now for now, what is now there? When I wrote it is, what it is now Dark Invader. pentest people, Sister businesses. So that’s incredibly well, quite rewarding. So as I’m sure you can imagine them nice to see you know, the baby grown up very interestingly.”

Conclusion

These are just snippets of what both Ben & Liam discuss in the podcast, for the full version, listen below.