A new team member marks the start of a new year and the success of Lucid’s internship programme. Joining in January 2007, Nico Denzl follows in the footsteps of Developer Neil Turner who joined as intern two years ago.

For six months, Nico will work four days a week as an application developer, spending the fifth day studying for his Microsoft Application Developer (MCAD) qualification. He hails from the University of Cape Town, where both Neil and Technical Director David Laing studied.

David explained: “We recruit graduates with programming skills so that they can start work straightaway. We provide study support allowing them to take on more responsibility as they acquire new skills, and they can practice these four days a week.”

“We also give interns ownership of a small internal project, such as developing a new product prototype. This is a big plus as it’s easy for them to take jobs after university that revolve around maintaining existing sites. This is a real challenge and allows them to demonstrate the extent of their skills.”

On passing his MCAD exams, Neil was offered a full-time role within the team. He said: “I hit the ground running with the re-launch of tracksafety.info for which I carried out all client-side coding. I was concerned that when I left university my coding skills would be obsolete as technology moves so fast. But Lucid didn’t expect me to know everything, just to learn quickly.”

And learn quickly is what Neil did: “Once I had attained my MCAD qualification, I went on to learn the Flash ActionScript development language. I picked it up so quickly that I now carry out all development work and define company policy on Flash.”