How we did the school of mobile developers in Saransk
Hello! The purpose of the article is to share experience, as we, by the efforts of the regional office of the development of an IT company, tried to solve the personnel issue and what came of it.
The main activity of our company is the development of mobile applications, which is about 90% of the software products we produce. It has also historically developed that most of the development department is concentrated in Saransk. And which is quite logical, we faced the problem of personnel shortage.
The simplest solution was to look for employees for a salary of x2, but surprisingly, even this method does not work; most people either sit in their place and do not want to change anything, or went to major cities. There is an option - we prepare the frames ourselves. Of the benefits - the relatively low cost of new employees and initially high loyalty to the company. Of the minuses - lack of experience in real projects.
The first step with which we began to implement our idea was the preparation of the curriculum. It may seem that this extra bureaucracy is useless, but as practice has shown, it is much more convenient for the teacher and the students themselves to know what will happen in the next lesson or what they have missed in the past. It all started with the usual list of questions, which, as we felt, everyone who wants to engage in mobile development should know. For example, a plan for iOS development began like this:
As you can see, the plan is designed for completely new programming beginners, but in the process of classes we managed to get interested at this stage and more advanced students. In the future, this plan was painted in more detail, for each lesson we have thought out the practical part and are now engaged in the fact that we describe each lesson separately in a more detailed form. Maybe someday this plan will grow into a good benefit.
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As for our spending. All of the “investment” in the school of developers cost two MacBook Air 13-inch and time to give lectures, and the time was more expensive. As a training room, we chose a rest room in our office, where there are quite comfortable tables, ottomans, a sofa, a board and a kettle. The atmosphere there is quite free and this, I think, served as an extra motivation for those who do not like student lectures and boring classes.
The most crucial moment has come - we have posted announcements about the opening of the school. In a creative impulse, we even drew a logo for our school, which in turn made our ads more visible and interesting.
In the announcement of the requirements were only the desire to learn and knowledge of the basic principles of programming. Those. our “student” is a senior university student who did laboratory work in pairs and who have not yet lost the desire to enter the profession. We have posted ads both offline: in the buildings of technical faculties; and online: our VKontakte group, an ad from which we asked our friends to repost (a group of faculties and a user group of developers). As a result, according to our calculations, the coverage turned out to be quite large: several hundred views a day, which is not a bad result for a regional IT group.
And here we began to receive letters from those who wish to study. There were a few dozen of these for each platform. And the time has come to choose among them “worthy”. For ourselves, we immediately determined that it was wrong to recruit a dozen people - because mass education suffers from poor quality. Therefore, for ourselves, we decided that a group of 4-5 people would be fine with us. One teacher can easily control individually each student and students can always count on attention to themselves. In general, we had a goal to choose the most suitable for us.
The interview consisted of a request to tell about yourself, about what kind of programming experience there is and why I would like to start learning exactly mobile development.
As it turned out - it was not a problem at all, because among all those who want to study, there are as many people with basic knowledge as needed. The rest, we advised to start with the basic principles of programming (learn what variables, methods are, write “Hello, world!” And come to us again).
Having typed two groups of students (iOS and Android), we finally started to study. Classes are held here, as I wrote above, in our rest room. By the time we thought that the most convenient would be the schedule of two evening classes per week, lasting 1-2 hours. However, as practice has shown, there are difficult topics for which sometimes two hours are not enough, so during the course of classes, the plan had to be rewritten and some questions should be divided into two or more lessons.
The lesson itself consists of a theoretical part, where the teacher on a specific example explains the topic of the lesson and practical, where students are divided into pairs and performs a complicated task, usually related to the current topic and the topic of the last lesson.
At the beginning of last year, when we had our first graduation, our team was replenished with several developers at once, who still work with us and in some moments have already outgrown their teachers.
In this academic year, we again hope for replenishment in our ranks, and in two directions at once.
And we are not going to dwell on this, and we are already starting to plan a new training format - the IT laboratory of web projects. About her, if everyone is interested, we will also write a small report.
In the end, I would like to note that we are not the only ones who created their own school of developers. There are developer courses for other companies, both internal and on the basis of a local university. A few days ago, the company Mail.ru announced the opening of its school of developers in our city. I would like to wish them good luck in such a difficult task, and perhaps this will once again improve the personnel issue in our city and in our company in particular.
The main activity of our company is the development of mobile applications, which is about 90% of the software products we produce. It has also historically developed that most of the development department is concentrated in Saransk. And which is quite logical, we faced the problem of personnel shortage.
The simplest solution was to look for employees for a salary of x2, but surprisingly, even this method does not work; most people either sit in their place and do not want to change anything, or went to major cities. There is an option - we prepare the frames ourselves. Of the benefits - the relatively low cost of new employees and initially high loyalty to the company. Of the minuses - lack of experience in real projects.
Syllabus
The first step with which we began to implement our idea was the preparation of the curriculum. It may seem that this extra bureaucracy is useless, but as practice has shown, it is much more convenient for the teacher and the students themselves to know what will happen in the next lesson or what they have missed in the past. It all started with the usual list of questions, which, as we felt, everyone who wants to engage in mobile development should know. For example, a plan for iOS development began like this:
- Basics of development. iOS, Xcode, HelloWorld
- Objective-C. Basics of language. Operators. Data types. Variables. Arrays
- Objective-C. Classes, fields, methods, properties
As you can see, the plan is designed for completely new programming beginners, but in the process of classes we managed to get interested at this stage and more advanced students. In the future, this plan was painted in more detail, for each lesson we have thought out the practical part and are now engaged in the fact that we describe each lesson separately in a more detailed form. Maybe someday this plan will grow into a good benefit.
')
Training
As for our spending. All of the “investment” in the school of developers cost two MacBook Air 13-inch and time to give lectures, and the time was more expensive. As a training room, we chose a rest room in our office, where there are quite comfortable tables, ottomans, a sofa, a board and a kettle. The atmosphere there is quite free and this, I think, served as an extra motivation for those who do not like student lectures and boring classes.
Student recruitment
The most crucial moment has come - we have posted announcements about the opening of the school. In a creative impulse, we even drew a logo for our school, which in turn made our ads more visible and interesting.
In the announcement of the requirements were only the desire to learn and knowledge of the basic principles of programming. Those. our “student” is a senior university student who did laboratory work in pairs and who have not yet lost the desire to enter the profession. We have posted ads both offline: in the buildings of technical faculties; and online: our VKontakte group, an ad from which we asked our friends to repost (a group of faculties and a user group of developers). As a result, according to our calculations, the coverage turned out to be quite large: several hundred views a day, which is not a bad result for a regional IT group.
Job interviews
And here we began to receive letters from those who wish to study. There were a few dozen of these for each platform. And the time has come to choose among them “worthy”. For ourselves, we immediately determined that it was wrong to recruit a dozen people - because mass education suffers from poor quality. Therefore, for ourselves, we decided that a group of 4-5 people would be fine with us. One teacher can easily control individually each student and students can always count on attention to themselves. In general, we had a goal to choose the most suitable for us.
The interview consisted of a request to tell about yourself, about what kind of programming experience there is and why I would like to start learning exactly mobile development.
As it turned out - it was not a problem at all, because among all those who want to study, there are as many people with basic knowledge as needed. The rest, we advised to start with the basic principles of programming (learn what variables, methods are, write “Hello, world!” And come to us again).
Classes
Having typed two groups of students (iOS and Android), we finally started to study. Classes are held here, as I wrote above, in our rest room. By the time we thought that the most convenient would be the schedule of two evening classes per week, lasting 1-2 hours. However, as practice has shown, there are difficult topics for which sometimes two hours are not enough, so during the course of classes, the plan had to be rewritten and some questions should be divided into two or more lessons.
The lesson itself consists of a theoretical part, where the teacher on a specific example explains the topic of the lesson and practical, where students are divided into pairs and performs a complicated task, usually related to the current topic and the topic of the last lesson.
results
At the beginning of last year, when we had our first graduation, our team was replenished with several developers at once, who still work with us and in some moments have already outgrown their teachers.
In this academic year, we again hope for replenishment in our ranks, and in two directions at once.
And we are not going to dwell on this, and we are already starting to plan a new training format - the IT laboratory of web projects. About her, if everyone is interested, we will also write a small report.
Total
In the end, I would like to note that we are not the only ones who created their own school of developers. There are developer courses for other companies, both internal and on the basis of a local university. A few days ago, the company Mail.ru announced the opening of its school of developers in our city. I would like to wish them good luck in such a difficult task, and perhaps this will once again improve the personnel issue in our city and in our company in particular.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/241778/
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