As it has been mentioned, it hugely depends on a company. You're at least writing about a team of testers, but what I see around is a lot of companies where you're the only tester in the house, so you can't even turn to anybody for advice. Then it's a real challenge if you arrive there with little to no experience. I suspect this is what a lot of agile projects suffer from, there's only one tester on the team, but no other process of sharing knowledge with other testers (if there're some), which is partly because people tend to have more work than less, so there's no time for any sharing anyway. In my previous company we used to at least have meetings with other testers once a week, but from whatever reason, they were discontinued.
The other extreme end would be a corporation where you don't get any real tasks the first couple of weeks, they even might have a special training project that has no other purpose than allow you to practise some development/testing/... skills. However, my experience is people who know at least some bits and pieces and who show the desire to learn, they are quickly moved to a real project, usually alongside some more experienced colleagues.
What you're describing is a situation where the candidate (you) already has programming skills. Therefore, the automation part of the job should not be that hard anymore. You still might need to learn (and struggle at the beginning) testing skills, domain skills, and the system(s).
