• Question: what topics would be most versatile or useful in a cs apprenticeship for a future, taking into regards the use of ai as well as the stereotype of the cs job market being tough to enter

    Asked by zeeshan on 9 Jul 2025.
    • Photo: Marcus Davage

      Marcus Davage answered on 9 Jul 2025:

      Work on learning a small handful of programming languages very well. Try your hand at contributing to open source projects. Try a few “side projects.” For example, during COVID lockdown, we could never get a grocery delivery slot, as they were always fully booked. So I wrote a python script that monitored the delivery slot website page of my chosen grocer, and when one became available, it popped me a DM on Slack. For my Code Club, I wrote a program for a Raspberry Pi. I hid the Pi in a biscuit tin, and whenever anyone opened it, the motion sensor triggered the camera which took your photo and posted it on Twitter with a message “Step away from the biscuit tin!”

    • Photo: Steve Bowes-Phipps

      Steve Bowes-Phipps answered on 11 Jul 2025:

      If you enjoy problem solving, look closely at engineering type skills (software, electrical or mechanical). Software runs almost everything these days and there are few skilled people to code these embedded systems. AI is only a tool – don’t trust it to code on its own

    • Photo: Ben Green

      Ben Green answered on 11 Jul 2025:

      I wouldn’t say there is a exact topic you should focus on. I would recommend learning a bit of something on a range of topic as this is always a win if you have knowledge, even just basic, on more than one.

      My company is very keen for people to be like the saying “better to be a jack of all trades, than a master of one”. Of course some people are highly skilled in some than others but its not just one area.

      I would take advantage of AI, I personally have used ChatGPT, and expanded its use by giving this a detailed prompt asking it to pretend to be a mentor and guide towards topics or roles I am interested in and what I can do/learn to progress into this. So that I can add to my CV as one more thing to catch a recruiters eye.

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