The software engineering degree apprenticeship program at [redacted] has a large emphasis on work-based learning (WBL), with around 80% of the students’ time over four years spent at the workplace. This work-based aspect of the program takes a more prominent role in the final two years, by which time the apprentices are undertaking increasingly larger and more prominent roles at 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 flexible structure. Basing our design 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 categorized 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. Having put this structure of WBL assessments into practice, we then present our experience of implementing it, an analysis of student feedback, and the adjustments made in response to this feedback cycle.

With an increasing focus on work-ready skills and competency-based learning in software engineering education, we expect the theory-informed structure we developed, and our experience of running and adapting it, may serve as an exemplar for developing a WBL program at research-led institutions.