STEP — Student Training & Education Programs — is how vocational students work inside Valfiguer. It has run since 2025 with two colleges:
- IES Brianda de Mendoza, Guadalajara
- IES Ribera de los Molinos, Murcia
Participants are first- and second-year students of DAM (Multiplatform Application Development), a Spanish vocational qualification.
Real product, not exercises
What defines the programme is that there is no parallel practice project. The work happens on the same code that serves customers: Projekt Republic, the platform we also run our own operation on.
That changes what gets learned. A classroom exercise ends when it compiles; a feature in production ends when someone uses it without writing to you. Between those two lies almost everything a syllabus cannot hold: reviewing someone else's code, understanding why a decision from a year ago was made that way, and discovering that the edge case you were going to ignore is the one a customer hits every Tuesday.
Why we do it
Out of self-interest, and it is worth saying so rather than dressing it as philanthropy. The distance between finishing a DAM qualification and being useful on a product team is real, and somebody pays for it: either the college simulating an environment it cannot have, or the first employer for six months. Closing it from the inside is cheaper for everyone and produces better professionals.
And because first-rate technology should not depend on having had access to it before.
What it is not
It is not cheap labour and it is not disguised recruitment. Students come through their college and on their qualification's terms, and their work is judged by the same standard as anyone's: if the code is not ready it does not land, and why is explained.
If you are at a vocational school with a DAM course and want seats for your students, the programme and the form are at /step.