Assessing Work-Based Learning in the Senior Years of a Software Engineering Graduate Apprenticeship Program

The software engineering graduate apprenticeship program at the School of Computing, University of Glasgow, has a significant emphasis on work-based learning (WBL), with approximately 80% of the students' time over four years spent in the workplace. This work-based aspect of the program plays a more prominent role in the final two years, by which time apprentices are undertaking increasingly larger roles in the workplace. In this report, we present how we addressed the challenge of structuring and assessing WBL in these senior years such that there is a balance between professional competency attainment and ranked academic achievement, while providing a fair and flexible structure. Based on a model of WBL presented by Raelin in 1997, we outline our rationale for dividing the assessments into workplace projects, workplace journal, and a portfolio of artefacts. The projects are categorised into different types both for flexibility and to encourage academia-industry collaboration, the workplace journal encourages higher forms of reflection, while the portfolio assessment encourages and assesses the attainment of professional competencies. We present our experience of implementing this structure, an analysis of student feedback, and the adjustments made in response. With an increasing focus on work-ready skills and competency-based education in software engineering education, we expect the theory-informed structure we developed, and our experience of running and adapting it, to serve as an exemplar for developing a WBL program at research-led institutions.