My apprenticeship journey at dxw
The apprenticeship helped me build confidence not just in my technical skills, but in how I approach learning itself
William joined the GovPress team at the start of 2025 and has just completed his apprenticeship. He shares with us how he has found the last year and what he’s looking forward to in the future.
Before starting my apprenticeship at dxw, my life looked very different to how it does now. I was splitting my time between helping out in my family’s takeaway, taking on freelance web development jobs, and getting involved in community programming projects where I could. I enjoyed coding, but my experience was fairly fragmented, and I didn’t yet have a clear picture of how that could turn into a long-term career.
In January 2025 I joined dxw as an apprentice. From the beginning, the apprenticeship felt a lot more hands-on than I expected. Rather than just shadowing or working through training exercises, I was quickly involved in helping on real projects.
A lot of my day-to-day time was spent doing research and working on side projects that supported the main delivery teams. Often this meant working in parallel to larger projects, picking up tasks that the core team didn’t have capacity for.
One of my projects was creating a plugin to streamline our development of new sites and avoid duplication of work. This was used almost immediately on a new client project and seeing something I’d built actually being used straight away was a huge confidence boost. It made the work feel real, and it helped me understand how much trust the team was placing in me. That level of trust surprised me throughout the apprenticeship. I was given a lot of control over how my projects worked and how I approached problems. I was never left completely on my own, though — Mat and Sarah were always there to guide me, sanity-check ideas, and point me in the right direction when I needed it. Having that balance of independence and support made a big difference to how much I learned.
Another key part of my role involved handling support tickets. These ranged from small tasks like updating content or tweaking styling, to much bigger challenges, such as tracking down and fixing bugs caused by WordPress updates. I found that I really enjoyed the investigative side of this work — digging into unfamiliar code, figuring out what was going wrong, and learning how different parts of the WordPress environment fit together. It was a great way to get exposure to code written by other people on the team and to understand real-world problem-solving.
Over time, the apprenticeship helped me build confidence not just in my technical skills, but in how I approach learning itself. I got used to researching independently, testing ideas, and working things out step by step.
Now that the apprenticeship is finished, I don’t have a perfectly defined long-term plan yet, but I know I want to keep learning and building on what I’ve started. I’m also looking forward to getting stuck into a site rebuild project starting in early February.
If I were asked whether I’d recommend the apprenticeship, the answer would definitely be yes. I expected a lot more reading, observing, and small background tasks. Instead, I was given real responsibility and hands-on opportunities. In some ways, I was thrown in at the deep end, but in a good way. It pushed me to grow faster than I think I would have otherwise.
Looking back, the apprenticeship didn’t just teach me how to write better code. It helped me understand how to work as part of a team, how to take ownership of problems, and how to keep learning even when things feel unfamiliar. For me, that’s been just as important as any technical skills.