SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa - Scale Your Future: An Immersive Engineering Programme Radha Kumari, Slack; Margarita Glushkova and Berkeli Halmyradov, Slack / Code Your Future Software infrastructure and operations are hard to break into. Most computer science grads aren't well-prepared for the industry but pathways like internships do exist. For non-graduates the doors are locked and bolted. This talk is about how Slack partnered with Code Your Future, a free, volunteer-run coding school for refugees, asylum seekers and other people excluded from education, to build a volunteer team of industry professionals and designed an innovative curriculum and work placement to find and nurture promising new talent. Join us as we hear first-hand what it was like for two of those new engineers, who have been through the course and the work placement: what they learned, what surprised them, what was difficult, and how their outlook on software engineering has changed. We hope attendees will be inspired to invest in similar initiatives and unlock opportunities for under-represented individuals. View the full SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa program at https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23emea/program