Data Engineering Academy (School Of Tech)
Overview
The Data Engineering programme is a 12, 9 or 7-week course designed to take people from all backgrounds, with beginner programming experience, and help them to start a career in data engineering.
This of course overlaps with the deliveries of the same material that we co-deliver with the global employment charity Generation - see also Generation Data Academy.
The longer 12 week programme was developed in partnership with the global employment charity Generation. Next Generation Engineering provides the technical curriculum and also the instructors to lead the delivery of the programme. Generation provides soft skills and employability content designed to help prepare the learners for employment.
The length of the delivery depends on the audience - internally it is currently 7 across School Of Tech / Accenture, and for many clients it is 12 weeks. The shorter the delivery, the higher the technical entry requirements.
The mission of the programme is ultimately to get each learner into employment as an entry-level data engineer. Our key part of this at Next Generation Engineering is to help them become well-rounded, adaptable Data Engineers that understand their role, responsibilities, and ways of working.
Programme structure
The 12, 9 or 7-week course is split into two halves:
- Foundations & mini-project: introducing Python programming, CRUD data operations, simple data storage, and basic application design from the ground up. This also includes introducing the learners to associated professional programming practices such as version control, unit testing, using IDEs, and the Unix shell. The majority of the time is spent delivering taught sessions and guided workshops, teaching learners the skills and concepts and practising these through exercises.
- In parallel, on the longer 12 week course, the learners then apply these new skills and knowledge to a mini-project, a simple CLI application that they build individually and which progresses incrementally over the six weeks. This helps them both solidify and apply learning, and builds confidence in what they can achieve.
- Advanced Concepts & Final Project: building on the core skills learnt in the first half, the lessons now move on to focus more specifically around data engineering technologies, techniques and tools, together with agile delivery and cloud infrastructure. Concepts such as data normalisation, data cleansing and ETL are introduced, together with data warehousing, data streaming and data queues. These concepts are delivered via taught sessions, but more time in the second half is also dedicated to working together in teams on a final team project with a shared codebase per team. The final team project involves building up an ETL data pipeline to process, analyse, and visualise data.
Post-programme support
After completing the programme, Academites join client teams as Associate Consultants. Ongoing support comes in many forms, but especially from their People Lead and for NGE staff an Associate Career Mentor.
Interested in joining Next generation or the wider Accenture?
You can find out more here: