Early careers
There are many routes for you to join HMGCC
"The skills you develop here you can't learn anywhere else, especially with hands on experience. My plan is to come and work at HMGCC when I graduate!"
Lauren, former CyberFirst intern
Graduate careers
As a graduate, you can make an immediate and ongoing contribution to the entire development lifecycle of products, systems and solutions that are vital to the nation's security.
Everything you've learnt so far will have given you the knowledge to get you started in your career, and you can continue your professional development through training opportunities at HMGCC. Training is not confined to work experience alone. Through continuing professional development, our goal is to make sure that all our people, both newly qualified graduates and highly experienced professionals, achieve their full potential.
If you discover a training course, or a professional membership you want to obtain, we can certainly support that too.
You can drive your career progression into a variety of areas, whether you want to progress into a leadership position or become an expert in your field, you'll receive the support and opportunities you need.
Landing Zone
There's plenty of scope for engineering graduates to make an impact at HMGCC, so much so that we've designed the landing zone to help you find your feet and work out the best place for you.
The landing zone will see you spend up to three months working on real projects, working out which team best fits in with your strengths. You'll be trained up on our style of engineering and get experience of our domains and toolsets, and then together we'll work out where you'll begin your exciting career.
Graduate benefits
You'll get fantastic benefits at HMGCC, including:
• Competitive starting salary – see the advertised job descriptions for the current rates
• Robust progression system
• Mentoring and buddy support
• Working on real life projects right from the start
• Online training and eLibrary access
• Chartership/accreditation route for professional membership - BCS, IET, APM
CyberFirst
CyberFirst is a government-backed scheme and a pivotal part of the UK's national cyber security programme.
It covers a broad range of activities including a comprehensive bursary scheme, a girls-only competition and development courses at UK universities and colleges. Each activity is designed to give talented young people the support, skills, experience and exposure they need to become the cyber workforce of the future.
There has never been a greater need for young talented people to help protect UK society, our families and our way of life. As a key part of the UK government's national cyber security programme, CyberFirst will deliver a broad range of activities designed to identify and support talented young people through their education and highlight exciting career opportunities in cyber security.
HMGCC's CyberFirst summer placement
Since 2018, HMGCC has welcomed over 100 CyberFirst interns, who complete an eight-week summer placement with us as part of the scheme.
We have been recognised multiple times in the annual CyberFirst awards, twice winning the Government Champion title.
During a placement with us, you'll learn and develop skills in software engineering and security research.
As well as these skills you'll also get a chance to learn about what we do, as an organisation.
You'll go to talks from our teams, as well as have the chance to visit the national security organisations we support, to find out more about their work.
Security research
This will involve taking part in training to learn C, ARM, and Ghidra from our Security Research experts.
Following this you'll be split again into teams of 4 (and over) to complete a security evaluation of a product.
Previous products have been:
• smart locks
• office desk phones
• KVMs
• custom FTP server
• custom hardware devices and more.
During the whole process you will be given guidance and training from our software and security research experts, many of whom are CyberFirst alumni.
Software engineering
This involves working as part of a large team on different aspects of a project.
This project will be created to guide you through the usage of our software engineering practices, using tools such as JIRA, Confluence, and Bitbucket. After this, you will then get the choice of another project to work on in small teams of three or four. You'll use the tools and practices you have previously learnt to create this project from scratch.
Previous projects have been:
• Android apps
• Android automation tools
• Raspberry Pico LED diode
• data processing tool
• live forensics tools
