
Apprenticeship: The first day
Alex and I have been joining Team Voyager as apprentices for over half a year now. In this article, I'd like to take you on a short journey back to our first day at work.
Monday, 3 July 2023... In the middle of Hamburg in the shadow of the ‘Mundsburg Tower’. The official start of training would have been on 1 August, but we had the idea of settling in a month earlier as part of an internship...
Start as part of Team Voyager
I set off at around 9.15 a.m. and receive a very warm welcome from Felix, Simon and Marc. Two desks are already waiting in the Voyager team room. Both are covered in sweets, streamers and presents, and somewhere out of this mountain is a monitor, also covered in streamers. As I was the first of the two of us to arrive, I was lucky enough to be able to choose one of the two seats, although Alex hasn't complained about his seat yet. :-) The first thing we did was to inspect everything that had been provided for us: A MacBook Pro, a Bluetooth mouse & keyboard, a docking station, a Raspberry & Arduino starter kit (both requested by the vocational school), the F7 manual, as well as some useful odds and ends (USB stick, SD cards, college pad, TYPO3 pen, etc.). At 9.30 a.m. our daily was on the schedule. For this, we have a set order in which we go through the team and everyone gets an overview of what they did the day before, what they have to do that day and what blockers are in the way of their current tasks. The aim is for all team members to be aware of the current status of tasks that they are not currently working on themselves and to coordinate the various specialist areas in our team in order to ensure the cleanest possible workflow.
Setting up the workplace
The next step was to set up our Macs, for which a multi-page onboarding paper was available. It explained step by step all the relevant applications such as: Slack, Redmine, Gitlab, 1Password, the central file server, internal time booking and holiday tool. There was even helpful information on the office kitchen and reporting absences. On the basis of these detailed instructions, it was no problem to get started on our own responsibility and where questions remained unanswered, the next team member was just a quick question away. From the outset, we were given the time to be looked after and given the feeling that our questions were important and that there was room for them. In general, we were given the essential values of our F7 corporate culture right from the start, such as ‘no fear of making mistakes’ and ‘internal appointments are to be treated like external appointments’. We arrive prepared and on time and don't keep colleagues waiting.
A small conclusion
Overall, I can summarise my first day at F7 as a successful start to my professional life, I felt very well accepted and valued from the very beginning.