The Graduate Academy: Becoming a T-shaped Consultant
- Arabella Green
- 44 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Arabella
After completing a Modern Languages degree, followed by an intensive UX design course, I joined Solirius as a Graduate Digital Consultant this September. I'm excited to be working within a user-centred design (UCD) team that is motivated to make services more inclusive and ethical in the public sector.
Kayenat
Coming from a non-technical background, I was pleasantly surprised by the seamless transition Solirius has enabled for me to join the team as a Graduate Digital Consultant. I’m looking forward to learning and developing my skills in the UCD team and contributing to meaningful digital solutions.
Overview of the Reply Group
Solirius is part of the Reply Group, a decentralised network of specialist companies around the world focused on designing and implementing innovative solutions in the Digital Services, Technology and Consulting fields. Its global scale creates an impressive culture of knowledge sharing: I’m currently taking a Gen AI for Digital Experiences course run by Reply experts, which has offered fascinating insights into using AI tools effectively. The social side is equally vibrant, with events running throughout the week, from pottery and sports sessions to foodie meetups - a brilliant opportunity to meet colleagues from other companies and enjoy some delicious food.
Arabella
Initial Thoughts
Beginning my first full-time role was both exciting and a little overwhelming. Stepping into a huge corporate office for the first time brought a mix of nerves and anticipation, but joining the Graduate Academy made the transition much smoother. Being surrounded by others at a similar stage created an immediate sense of community that grew as the weeks went on.
On our first day, the founder of Solirius, Hemel Popat, spoke about the company's origins, values, and vision for the future. This set the tone for the rest of our training, helping us understand how employees find purpose in their work, particularly given that many of Solirius' projects serve the public sector.
Kayenat
The Graduate Academy
The Graduate Academy introduced us to life at Solirius through structured, hands-on training led by senior staff. Each session included practical tasks that mirrored the team’s day-to-day work. The sessions covered a wide range of topics across various practices, including workshops on design ideation, QA testing, cloud and DevOps, as well as informative sessions on neurodiversity awareness and agile delivery methodologies.
Becoming a T-shaped Consultant
Although we would soon join different practices within Solirius, the Graduate Academy brought everyone together to tackle technical, design, and business challenges as one group. This reflected the company’s focus on developing T-shaped consultants, people who have deep expertise in their primary discipline and a broad understanding of others.
The Academy helped us start building that breadth by introducing us to the language and methods of adjacent disciplines. For those of us joining the design team, this meant stepping into unfamiliar areas like GitHub workflows, DevOps, and automation testing. Gaining exposure to these tools helped us develop empathy for the demands of other disciplines, enabling us to collaborate effectively in multidisciplinary teams.
The Case Study Challenge
We were pleasantly surprised by how involved senior leadership were: leading and participating in workshops, sharing insights into Solirius' foundations and future, and making us feel comfortable contributing to discussions.
I found the workshops simulating real team structures, such as the session on Stakeholder Management led by the business consulting practice, really insightful. The task mimicked a real-life project team gathering stakeholder requirements (with members of senior leadership acting as tricky stakeholders), developing a presentation, and a minimum viable product (MVP), to demonstrate our understanding of the scope.
We had the opportunity to organise ourselves and our ideas, as well as implementing best practices we had learnt, such as sprint management and creating tickets. This not only strengthened my technical skills but also fostered a sense of team work and innovation from the very beginning.
Kayenat
The Debugging Challenge
In brief, debugging involves finding and fixing errors in code. After an overview from a senior software developer, we were assigned the task of fixing a “broken” Ruby on Rails app in teams of three, guided only by a clue document.
We weren’t allowed to use AI, which pushed us to explore the file structure and gain a deeper understanding of how the app worked. Each group included someone with a background in software development, which meant they often had to explain their thought process and decisions to the rest of the team. This encouraged collaboration as we relied on each other to establish a shared understanding. By the end, the challenge gave me a clearer understanding of how code is structured, which helped hugely when it came to creating our own apps. Particularly, it enabled me to develop greater empathy for the demands of a developer role.
Arabella
Final Project- The Journal App
The journal app was our only individual challenge, which we spent a week tackling. Our challenge was to create apps using Ruby on Rails, putting into practice everything we had learned during the past five weeks of the Graduate Academy. It was fascinating to see how personal and professional interests shaped the apps we built. This resulted in a wide range of engaging and technically impressive ideas, which were insightful to listen to during the presentations.
Mini Projects, Major Learning:
I developed a recipe scaling calculator app based on my personal interest in baking (and eating baked goods). While the technical elements of coding the app seemed daunting at first, the consultants supporting our journey made it much less intimidating by guiding us through the building blocks, then leaving us with the creative freedom to express our skills and ideas. We had the autonomy to prioritise our workload, which led to a variety of apps showcasing a range of expertise from software development to user research.
I found the journal app project strongly paralleled the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This is the process of planning, designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software systems. In particular, I enjoyed the iterative stages of adapting designs, accessibility testing and debugging my app, shown in these examples below. A key takeaway from this was ensuring the user research informed my decisions throughout the journey. By working through the phases of the SDLC on a smaller scale, I could visualise how team members would collaborate in a real working environment.
Kayenat
Fast but Flawed: What I Learned from Using AI-Generated Users
With the aim of creating an app to improve the teacher recruitment process, finding real participants in just a few days proved to be difficult. To keep the project moving, I decided to experiment with AI-generated participants.
After defining my research goals, I asked ChatGPT to review public forums and teacher community discussions. As requested, it rapidly generated five user examples and fifteen key insights.
Despite the speed of this exercise, the limitations quickly became clear: I couldn’t verify the insights nor ask more probing questions to uncover underlying problems. For example, when the AI users mentioned specific frustrations with the Teaching vacancies service (like missing job view analytics), it lacked the means and the real teachers to confirm if these were accurate pain points.
This experiment showed that while AI can be a powerful rapid discovery tool for identifying likely challenges and broader trends, the uncertainty around its data sources means AI-generated user research isn’t yet reliable enough for high-stakes projects.
Arabella
AI Prototyping: The Risk of Visual Sameness
When brainstorming ideas, I used Figma Make to quickly build a working prototype with my planned features. Visualising the concept helped me spot missing elements and evaluate which features were truly necessary. The tool’s main limitation, however, is that it often produces visually similar results, offering little variation regardless of the prompt you enter. This became especially clear when comparing early prototypes amongst our graduate group: for those of us using AI design tools, the results looked strikingly similar.
The two examples above illustrate this issue. The first example is my teacher recruitment app prototype and the second example is a prototype I generated for individuals looking to improve their physical strength. Repeating the experiment with Lovable (another popular AI prototyping tool) produced similar results. This highlighted the risk of generic design outcomes when relying on AI tools.
Arabella
Reflections
Upon reflection, we appreciate the thorough training we received during the Grad Academy. The experience allowed us to learn new skills, understand agile ways of working in theory and practice, and identify areas of improvement in our personal and professional development. The graduate academy gave us a holistic understanding of how the company operates and how different practices connect, a view that will be invaluable as we move on to client projects.
Life after Graduation
Beyond the Graduate Academy, we also completed a week of focused UCD training. The hands-on sessions covered areas I hadn’t explored in depth before, such as content design and ethical data handling on public sector projects. This specialist training shows the design team’s commitment to helping us develop as growing experts within our disciplines.
Arabella
Having now joined my first project, one stand-out benefit I gained was the ability to spend time with not only my fellow graduates, but also with colleagues ranging in experience and practice. It equipped me with the confidence to reach out and build relationships with people in Solirius, and now in my project team, which has made my experience at Solirius very enjoyable.
Kayenat
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