Information technology (IT) company Spatial Dimension’s inaugural graduate internship programme, which started last month, is progressing well.

“We are less than a month into the programme and the interns are responding well to the training they are receiving,” says Spatial Dimensions implementation engineering manager Nick Holleman, who helped establish the internship programme.

The programme is designed to efficiently introduce young talent to the software development environment to supplement Spatial Dimension’s increasing development requirements.

Holleman says the company is also involved in cultivating scarce technical skills, which will benefit the IT and software development industries as well as the country.

Four promising University of Cape Town graduates – Phumlile Sopela, from the Eastern Cape; Nina Otsweleng, from Botswana; Matthew Watkins, from Cape Town; and Junaid Jamie, also from Cape Town – are being exposed to an in-house training programme for the first six months of the year. The programme is designed to prepare them for a career with Spatial Dimension as software developers for its main product, FlexiCadastre.

FlexiCadastre is an enterprise-scale land-management solution that uses a workflow-centric and spatially-enabled approach to provide a scalable, enterprise-ready and integrated solution to drive the efficient administration of mineral rights and contracts across multiple global jurisdictions.

The product has been adopted by mining companies and governments in countries, such as Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It has also recently been chosen as the mining cadaste system of the governments of Papua New Guinea, Laos and Namibia.

During the first stage of training, a dozen of Spatial Dimension’s experienced developers and consultants will train the interns in understanding Spatial Dimension’s products, tools and business processes.

Thereafter, one of Spatial Dimension’s most experienced developers, Michael Sands, will take the interns through the company’s existing code base to prepare them as developers of FlexiCadastre.

Sands will also mentor the interns once they start their mini projects in the second stage of training.

A variety of mini software-development projects will be selected in combination with the interns and will comprise projects that complement Spatial Dimension’s product offering, such as user interface improvement and reporting, or that benefit the company’s business management, such as online management dashboards, explains Holleman.

“We create a strongly supportive environment for the interns. They will be hosted and seated with the rest of the development team,” says Holleman.

During the programme, the graduates will be immersed in the culture of Spatial Dimension’s development team and learn the current methods being used in a production environment, which includes feature development, source code management and case management.

The interns will also have an opportunity to understand the architecture and life cycle of an enterprise-level software solution.

Holleman notes that the graduates who meet the stipulated requirements by the end of the programme will be offered permanent positions within Spatial Dimension’s software development team.

To complete the internship successfully, the interns have to demonstrate a strong understanding of the Web application framework, ASP.NET, for Web development and the appropriate patterns to work with the framework. They should also be able to write well- structured and efficient object-orientated visual basic code using Microsoft’s Visual Studio integrated development environment in the style currently used by the development team.

Interns also need to display ability to design suitable database structures and write appropriate SQL statements to create, alter and manipulate these structures and the data they contain.

Further, they need to write functional and technical specifications, understand the structure of the FlexiCadastre code base and demonstrate appropriate use of the solution to achieve code objectives. Competently managing source code in software versioning and revision control system, as well as cases in bug tracking software, are further requirements.

Minimum criteria required to apply for the internship includes either a bachelors or honours degree in computer science or information systems, and exposure to some of the technologies used by Spatial Dimension, such as .NET, JavaScript, SQL Server and GIS.