The Experience costs £149 and at the end you'll receive:

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• A complementary CV / career advice session from an experienced Dark Spark Co-Founder

• A comprehensive evaluation report looking at both your technical and soft skills

• A digital certification that you can use on LinkedIn (and the option of a recommendation extracted from the evaluation report)

The Consultant Experience is virtual - simulating a remote work engagement with a Dark Spark client.  There will be frequent message and group video interactions through MS Teams.

There will typically be between four and six participants, plus leadership provided by the two Co-Founders and technical support provided by other members of the Dark Spark team.

You will be assuming the role of a Dark Spark consultant. You'll need to use initiative and creativity as well as your data, communication and presentation skills.

Yes and no!  We'll provide you with a thorough brief of the client engagement scenario and materials to get you started with Agile/Scrum delivery.  However, we'll be encouraging the team of participants to be as self-organising as possible.  If you'd like to gain valuable leadership experience, this is a great opportunity for you to help shape the delivery.

Two weeks (ten working days), running from Monday to Friday.

The Experience is intended to be full-time, running between 09:00-17:00 UK Time. 

We'll run a Daily Scrum call every day at 09:00 and you may receive communications at any time (like a real client engagement). However, given that the meetings will be virtual, in some cases different working patterns could be mutually agreed within the team of participants.

We run the two-week Experience on the first two weeks of every month (starting from the first working Monday of the month).

If we're unable to run a cohort due to insufficient numbers (or any other reason) we'll contact you to seek alternative availability or offer a full refund.

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Please note that the selection of dates shown on the registration form are the only ones currently available to book, although if you have a particular interest in joining a future cohort, please let us know: DSCE@darksparkconsulting.com

No - we speak to a lot of data scientists and graduates and overwhelmingly it is attitude, aptitude and willingness to learn quickly that differentiate candidates.  We will ask you to provide your CV (information about your background and experience with data) during the registration process and we may select individual teams and cohorts deliberately to create a balance of skills - but there are no hard and fast requirements.

We'll expect you to have a device suitable for:

• Downloading/running Microsoft Teams

• Accessing cloud services and virtual machines

• Carrying out data analysis 

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If you think your device is suitable, it probably is.  For any tasks involving more compute power, we may decide to provide access to cloud-based virtual machines.
 

We retain your information for six months following completion of the Experience - our Privacy Notice provides further details about this as part of the registration process.  This retention period is partly for record-keeping purposes and partly to give us the option to get in touch with you should any further Dark Spark training or employment opportunities arise.  However, if you would prefer us not to contact you, please just let us know (DSCE@darksparkconsulting.com)

Let us know (DSCE@darksparkconsulting.com) why you've changed your mind and we'll review on a case-by-case basis.  We want to make sure you enjoy and benefit from the Experience but we also have costs associated with organising and running the programme, so we generally don't offer refunds unless there's a good reason.