Dandelion Work Experience Program

The DXC Dandelion Work Experience Program is a paid work experience program for tertiary students on the autism spectrum. The goal of the program is to provide higher education students with the opportunity to take part in technical work experience and improve their confidence, technical and team working skills to increase their employability.

Ongoing assistance and mentoring form a significant part of the Dandelion Program. Designed to provide high levels of support to participants, both from a technical and autism perspective, the program ensures that work experience candidates are able to learn and grow as employees and as individuals.

Components

The program consists of an initial four week structured course that enables participants to learn how software development projects operate in a large commercial organisation – such as DXC – in an autism-friendly environment.

Involving a balance of learning and practical project work in which participants have the opportunity to be part of an agile development team, the course allows work experience candidates to gain experience in different roles in the software development lifecycle.

Participants use state-of-the-art robotics, such as the Aldebaran NAO H25 robot (Dandy!), to assist local autistic primary school educational development. Building projects such as these gives the work experience candidates the chance to demonstrate what they can achieve, and how they approach problems and resolve them, using the skills and abilities they develop.

The culmination of the project delivers real value to primary schools that work with autistic children, and a secondary benefit in that it allows the primary school students involved to project forward to desire IT careers in the future for themselves, through their interaction with the higher education students on the autism spectrum.

Development and Delivery

The way candidates learn and develop their practical projects is led by DXC technical capability managers and practitioners, who provide them with the techniques, processes, tools, and experience they will use to deliver the two projects. During the practical projects, each individual works as part of a team consisting of five members, all of whom are on the autism spectrum, and together they develop two robot based applications during two separate three week project cycles. At the completion of both projects, teams nominate one of the two projects to implement into a live environment.