Would you recommend building up a portfolio for Tech?

work experience

Hi,Building a portfolio is valuable. Essential & favoured projects are ones which demonstrate you clearly have a passion for and match the role/company. Just to let you know, I have answered similar questions in the past and you can find them by filtering by [link removed] If you want to join a Data Analytics apprenticeship at an a Bank, building website for example for a to do list isn't going to be that useful. You could build/implement a machine learning algorithm that supports your ability to deduce loan repayment trends or financial security performance. I feel this would be impressive. Especially if you've done the research for the project yourself rather than followed a [link removed] Hadia mentioned, work experience would be useful to! Although, I personally think you'll find more value trying to build something from your own research at this level of your career, as work experience opportunities for apprentices are usually quite light in complexity and difficult to find w/respect to certain roles. Building your own project can give you deeper context to problems, process of project definition, tool selection, and clear evidence for company/role specific capability and knowledge of the role requirements. If you can get both XP & Projects, that's even better!

Hey, did you have any particular programmes or companies in mind who offer work experience to Year 13 students?

Thank you illack this helps a lot, when conducting your own project/research, how much formal documentation would be expected from a portfolio and how much would be considered too much?

I'd say that again it depends on project/research depth and what you want to prove> If you're simply doing analysis of trends, then maybe a [link removed] file in the project explaining rational & process is enough> If it's a web application or cyber security product, "documentation" can come naturally - in the form of: database schema design, logic notes, policy definitions, website itself, architectural design diagrams, comments in code/docstrings (python) etc. Additionally your source code will speak for itself, if anyone is interested in seeing the code specifically, they can judge based on your design practices [link removed]; If it's an in depth research piece then you'll write a report, clearly structured, maybe 2000-2500 words. I'd say a report isn't really the best thing unless you want to go into research long term. Even if you do, it'll be more important you learn & implement concepts with a shorter word and clear presentation of results.

That makes sense, thank you for your help!