Alumni story15 January 2026
Farrukh Ahmad is a first-year software engineer apprentice at ClearScore and a graduate of Ada’s sixth form. During his application journey, he founded ApprenticeWatch.com, a centralized platform for apprenticeships. We spoke with Farrukh about his experiences with ApprenticeWatch and his current apprenticeship journey.
What’s been the most surprising or rewarding part of the transition from Ada Sixth Form to a degree apprenticeship at Ada?
The most surprising part was how seamless the transition was! I was expecting it to be a big jump in some aspects but no, it was mostly the same structure of the lecturers presenting new information and assigning coursework, so for me the transition was a good experience.
Could you give us a quick glimpse into your day-to-day work at ClearScore? What is one specific skill you’ve learned or developed since September that you didn’t have before?
My day-to-day is starting the workday after a standup with the team, reflecting on what I’ve done the day before and what I plan on doing. At the moment, as I am very early on in my career, most of my work is dealing with tickets I’ve been assigned, or working in a team to complete that ticket. Before ending the day, I take 5 minutes to reflect personally on what I’ve done, what I found difficult, and making a quick list of what to do tomorrow.
Since joining ClearScore I’ve had the opportunity to develop my skill of multitasking, since previously I would focus on one singular task and complete it with no distractions whatsoever, which is great for the short term, but it leads to burnout in the long run.
What was the ‘lightbulb moment’ or the key problem you identified that made you decide to set up ApprenticeWatch?
When I started to apply for apprenticeships, I found the whole process extremely inefficient, with apprenticeships scattered across multiple platforms and websites with poor UX. The process of tracking all these different platforms, groups, and social media became overly time-consuming and I believed that I could change that. So, I decided to launch ApprenticeWatch.com in Feb 2025 to aggregate apprenticeships under one platform with a beautiful design and UX so aspiring apprentices don’t have to track multiple platforms.
Now that you’re doing an apprenticeship, do you approach ApprenticeWatch differently? Are there new things you would add to it?
Oh, absolutely! ClearScore is experiencing incredible growth, acquiring millions of new users every year, I’ve been able to identify lots of processes they put in place that enabled them to reach this stage. A big thing I’ve found ClearScore to focus on is running experiments to understand the impact of a change on users and how it changes their behaviour against the KPIs. I plan on replicating this strategy for ApprenticeWatch.
How can fellow Ada apprentices support ApprenticeWatch?
We’re working on helping our users secure apprenticeships by providing them with tips and advice from current apprentices. These have primarily been in the form of articles, but we intend on producing short videos that we can feature on our website. It would be great if you’d be down to feature in a video, or if you’d like to write an article, or even help us with some of the backend tech. You can contact me at farrukh@apprenticewatch.com.