The BBC is truly a fascinating place to work, where every day presents me with a fresh challenge. As the world’s largest broadcaster, it is important to keep expanding its digital services and constantly find new, innovative ways to entertain audiences. The role of the information security department has never been more important.

The BBC feels like an excellent place for an aspiring information security professional or anyone to thrive. With an extremely talented team, support is plentiful and opportunities to get involved in other areas of work are very common.

Despite being such a large organisation, I think communication is robust and the internal communications to staff are frequent, helping create a sense of familiarity with other initiatives and upcoming changes. This is invaluable when working in information security. Understanding the BBC, its values and its goals are instrumental to applying information security principles in a balanced and appropriate way that works for everyone.

I think that the dynamic nature of the BBC makes it a great place to gain and apply your skills. I'll never get tired of bumping into Craig Charles in the lift or watching Daleks from Doctor Who being unloaded from a truck in the court yard.

Former Extendee Ben Mustill-Rose has had a jam packed year at the BBC working in software development and he shares with us his highlights.

It's hard to believe that at the time of writing I've been at the BBC for just over a year. I've dealt with many varied and unexpected challenges, but looking back on my experiences so far, I can genuinely say that I've enjoyed every one of them and wouldn't change a thing if I had the chance.

I joined the BBC in October 2015 working as a trainee developer in test (DIT) for mobile iPlayer. The role of a DIT is to act as an enabler for the various people within a team, which usually translates as a bit of development, testing and 'devops' (think system administration) but this barely scratches the surface of what you can find yourself doing.

I'm really glad I chose to start my career being a DIT - you get given real responsibilities in the form of looking after products and servers, and there's always an opportunity to build something yourself as we're always looking to improve our tooling. For example I have been doing some incredibly interesting work reverse-engineering parts of Android and iOS for some internal software and hope to be in a position where some of this can be open sourced before the end of the year.

One of the things about the BBC that I learnt very quickly was that there are always plenty of opportunities to do things with other teams in addition to your main role. Here are just some of the things that I've been doing that I didn't expect to do when I started:

• Help build the BBC iPlayer Kids app
• Help out BBC Children’s with one of their games
• Give user experience advice to a handful of different iPlayer teams - a highlight for me was getting my hands on our Apple TV app and getting some fairly big user interface changes in
• Give technical and accessibility advice to the micro:bit team
• Help create a music festival
• Run events at the BBC as a Science, Technology Engineering and Maths Ambassador
• Help run coding workshops
• Design indoor navigation systems
• Design systems for autonomous drone control

Regarding accessibility I'd be lying if I said that everything has been plain sailing. My team are users of a specialist coding language which is essentially unusable with a screen reader. We're also heavy Mac users and whilst the built-in screen reader works really well with some applications, its terminal support is poor which makes using programs like Vi next to impossible for example.

It is worth pointing out that we do have a dedicated access services department who are able to supply and support various pieces of assistive technologies and support you when applying to access to work when you first start.

If you're thinking of applying to one of our new talent schemes through the Extend Hub, first and foremost I'd suggest that you put aside any reservations you may have and just give it a go. If you are offered a place, I would encourage you to really embrace the opportunity with both hands (I know that's a massive cliché) and do as many different things as possible - when I was on my placement my attitude was that I would say yes to everything by default and only turn something down if it clashed with something in my main role.

This job is my first since graduating. My CV was incredibly average. I had very little relevant experience but for some reason I was given a chance. I'll end the post with another cliché, but I really mean it when I say that it could be you!

You can apply for one of our technology schemes here. 

The eighth floor in BBC New Broadcasting House is home to the popular stations BBC Radio 1/1Xtra and Asian Network. The whole floor has an amazing buzz about it, and you can tell everyone is extremely keen to work there and create great content.

As a broadcast engineering apprentice working within the Popular Music Radio Operations Team, I have been tasked with completing a range of projects.

At Radio 1 I have been working on one of their station sound rooms. This has involved me creating custom mixes on the Yamaha 02R mixing console that is in the room, configuring and installing sound cards in the computers, creating feeds in and out of the computers and their sound cards, and configuring outboard processing units.

All this has been done to allow quick turnaround of features and shows that are up to broadcast quality instantly without the need for lots of extra work. This allows the teams to mix and export a show or feature and get it on the radio within minutes.

BBC Engineering schemes will be opening applications for the Class of 2017 from 24 Oct 2016 and applications will close on 6 January 2017. Visitbbc.co.uk/techcareers for more details or follow @BBCTrainees.