Natalya Bagrova and Evgenia Karpov: “We have made the DataArt educational program ourselves”

Evgenia Karpova, coordinator of the DataArt educational program , and Natalya Bagrova, head of the language education program, spoke about how courses, webinars and language classes are organized in the company.

- What is our educational program - or a complex of programs?
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- We have three main categories of courses - conditionally technical (there are about 70), language (3 different directions) and managerial. There are still webinars recorded on video - there are more than 400 of them. Inside each category there are different features.

Internal educational programs are in very high demand. We, unfortunately, only half a year ago, all put in order and began to keep records of everything. During this time, for example, technical courses have seen more than 2,000 hours. The courses for account managers are currently studying 70 people. All courses and webinars on a bunch of topics are stored in the internal library.

At the same time, most of the content that we have is made by ourselves and tailored to us. We now have about 90 full-fledged own courses. They are developed by free senior-specialists, and they are aimed precisely at what is then used in real projects, this is their trick. Course authors select external theoretical content - video lectures, texts, online directories. Theoretical content is the sea, it is not easy for an unprepared person to understand what makes sense to read and what doesn't. Our experts place accents, choose the best, the most sensible. And they make up the final practical tasks themselves - so that they first of all check the necessary DataArt skills.

In our library there are external courses, licenses for which we bought - Stratoplan, Adizes, English courses or in English. But these courses are just for familiarization, first of all for PM (project managers) and EM (account managers) - without practical tasks. These courses are not sharpened for us, and we have no right to change them.

This is all about our internal education. Of course, you can go and learn somewhere else. If there is a recommendation from the DM (delivery manager), from our industrial practice, or from the educational program itself, DataArt compensates for the cost of travel and training. If a colleague is going to speak at the conference, then he, too, is entitled to compensation. If you decide to go just to listen, it is also compensated, but after he makes a report on the results of the trip.

- Technologically, we have all the education collected on the EdX platform - tell us a little about it.

- For a while, we had a problem back that it became difficult to store all the accumulated material, share it, update it. We have begun a large-scale process to automate the entire educational program. Andrei Dereza, the head of our Dnepropetrovsk office, made an excellent overview of all these educational platforms - Udacity, EdX, and so on. It turned out that EdX provide their platform in open source.

Now the entire library of courses is stored on EdX, and from there information about the process, the progress of the person, what courses he listened to, whether he listened to the end, completed tasks, and so on, get into his profile in our internal PM system, through which all work in the company.

- How does DataArt encourage people to create educational content and listen to courses?

- Generally, special incentives are not required. People willingly make up courses and listen to them. As a rule, a request for a course comes from our resource managers. It is they who best represent to you those technologies that are now in demand. When such a request comes to us, we write to the appropriate community. There they can always tell us who is now free from experienced specialists, who can prepare the necessary theoretical material. Then this material and tasks for it are discussed in the community. Everyone speaks, rules something and adds until the course satisfies everyone.

There are, of course, the formal mechanisms of stimulation - we give people “tips” for being engaged in self-education in their free time. "Tipsy" is TYPs, "thank you points" is the local currency for which you can buy various nice things in our corporate store. In addition, we talk to those who are now in idle status, that is, without a specific project, that if he listens to such courses, he will be more attractive to projects.

Well, as I said, we have all the data on education fall into PM. That is, when it comes to including a person in an interesting new project, salary increase, promotion to another position, education data is taken into account - someone started listening to a lot of things, but quit, someone did not complete the task, someone did not listened, but someone, on the contrary, a great fellow.

I remember that one of our colleagues already talked about how our educational program helped him (megamozg.ru/company/dataart/blog/16090/). You can also cite the example of Anna Akimenko. She came to us to the role of junior .NET. Then there were courses on Sharepoint - this is a rather specific technology, specialists in which almost never sit idle: they are involved either in internal projects or in client projects. In general, less than a year has passed - and now Anya is already middle Sharepoint and middle .NET. Pretty cool, I think.

- There is a stereotype that programmers are mostly introverts, and introverts, probably, are not easy to teach.

- Yes, it is so unconditional. But our work on preparing developers for interviews with clients helps a lot.

We generally have all three areas in which we are engaged in English, sharpened to improve communication skills. The first direction is compulsory language preparation for a specific interview with a specific client, the second is language preparation for those who are currently sitting without a project, the third is a regular language course, like at a university.

An interview team is preparing us for the interview. They help newcomers, suggest what to say, how to behave, how to present yourself - both from a technical and human point of view, how to communicate with the customer. These people are ready teachers. They can both develop a program and present it, create tasks and ensure that people do it all with pleasure and interest.

A separate course - preparation for an interview for those who are in idle, i.e. without a project. He passes in two stages. First - the theoretical part, which gives an idea about what is to be during the interview, what questions you should be able to answer, and then - practical, with a native speaker.

In DataArt there is such a person, an Englishman named Simon Cox. He lives in Voronezh and works in our office. Simon helps to completely imitate a conversation with a foreign customer. At the expense of his charisma, personal qualities, acting skills, he can portray an evil customer, and a boring, and capricious customer, he can put his counterpart out of himself. This happens as part of his webinar course on communication skills. There he gives students the task of a specific project - fictional. Describes the rules, the agenda - as it happens in reality - and arranges a meeting. Then we analyze how the student behaved and give recommendations on what to work on.

We have our own system for testing communication skills - in several ways. This is our know-how, which we ask not to distribute to anyone.

In general, I must say that preparation for the interview, along with courses on the frontend, are our most popular educational programs, these skills are needed more or less by everyone.

Here we also have success stories - people who have completed our language courses, now constantly work with our English-speaking counterparties. For example, Vanya Glushchenko has been working in our New York office for a long time, Sveta Komarova has been working with foreign customers from St. Petersburg, Denis Baranov has worked and learned from St. Petersburg after Voronezh, now in London.

- The fact that DataArt has people who can create programs and teach others is also in a sense the result of our educational program, what we teach people to communicate?

- Yes exactly. Today I listened to Ivan Rikhmaer as a lesson, this is our senior Android specialist. It was both interesting, and fun, and lively, and it does not look like a fair lecture. And I always thought he was an introvert.

- Does DataArt have an idea of ​​which company would like to see its education system in a year, two, five?

- We are now analyzing which pedagogical methodologies work better for us and, accordingly, change the content of courses and technology of presentation. Some courses, we may gamify, above all, the most applied ones. Our technology community for this develop such beautiful trees of different skills, which will be tied courses.

But in general, we still go for demand. Now the main thing for us is to respond in a timely manner to requests from resource managers, to increase the volume of the course library, to close those lacunae that are still there, to respond to feedback on existing courses. Now, when we see negative feedback, we immediately go to the course supervisor and consult with him. He may disagree or agree and finalize the course.

- Is there any difference between the offices of the burden of education?

- No, there is no difference. In Ukraine, especially in Odessa, we see a little more interest in our external educational programs - for those who do not work for us yet. But within the company there is no difference. In total, since we started keeping records, our employees spent 247,744 hours on education, which are distributed roughly in proportion to the number of employees in a given office. In terms of knowledge of English, there is also no particular difference: the average level of candidates who come to us is about three, and this level, unfortunately, has remained stable for ten years. Universities provide good technical knowledge, but the level of language, as experience shows, depends mainly on the school that people graduated from. In St. Petersburg, for example, according to the knowledge of English, the 45th boarding school, the 239th and 30th schools are distinguished. In technical universities, people are not taught the language.

However, within the company, people are growing quite rapidly in this regard.

In general, we first scared. They said that we would not find the right amount of good developers with tolerable English. We were told that we are losing geniuses because they know the technology, but they don’t know the languages. But no! Everything worked out for us, and now we have the first English filter at the entrance - we take it with threes, then we bring it to mind. We make exceptions in isolated cases.