October 29, 2014 at 12:36How we did the school of mobile developers in Saransk
Hello! The purpose of the article is to share our experience of how we, through the efforts of the regional office for developing an IT company, tried to solve the personnel issue and what we got out of it.
The main activity of our company is the development of mobile applications, this is about 90% of our software products. It has also historically developed that a large part of the development department is concentrated in Saransk. And which is quite logical, we faced the problem of staff shortages.
The simplest solution was to look for employees for a x2 salary, but surprisingly, even this method does not work; most of the people either sit in their place and do not want to change anything, or have left for large cities. There remains an option - we are preparing the frames ourselves. Of the advantages - the relatively low cost of new employees and initially high loyalty to the company. Of the minuses - the lack of experience on real projects.
The first step with which we began to implement our idea was to draw up a curriculum. It may seem that this extra bureaucracy is useless, but as the 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 missed in the past. It all started with the usual list of questions, which, as we thought, should be known to everyone who wants to engage in mobile development. For example, an iOS development plan started like this:
As you can see, the plan is designed for completely newcomers to programming, but during the classes we managed to interest more advanced students at this stage. In the future, this plan was described in more detail, for each lesson we thought out the practical part and now we are engaged in the fact that each lesson is described separately in a more detailed form. Perhaps someday this plan will grow into a good allowance.
As for our spending. All the "investments" in the school of developers cost the purchase of two MacBook Air 13-inches and the time for lecturing, and the time cost more. As a room for training, we chose a relaxation 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, as I think, served as extra motivation for those who do not like student lectures and boring classes.
The most crucial moment has come - we have placed announcements about the opening of the school. In a creative outburst, we even drew a logo for our school, which in turn made our ads more visible and interesting.
In the announcement of the requirements there was only a desire to learn and knowledge of the basic principles of programming. Those. our “student” is a senior university student who has done laboratory work in pairs and who still has a desire to leave for the profession. We placed announcements offline: in the buildings of technical faculties; and online: our VK group, an ad from which we asked to repost our friends (group of faculties and user-group of developers). As a result, according to our calculations, the coverage turned out to be quite large: several hundred views per day, which is a good result for a regional IT group.
And now letters began to come to us from e-mails from those wishing to study. There were several dozens of them on each platform. And the time has come to choose among them "worthy." For ourselves, we immediately determined that recruiting a dozen people - the wrong option, because mass education suffers from poor quality. Therefore, we decided for ourselves that a group of 4-5 people would suit us. One teacher can well control each student individually and students can always count on attention to themselves. In general, our goal was to choose the most suitable for us.
The interview consisted of a request to tell about yourself, about what experience in programming and why you want to start learning specifically mobile development.
As it turned out, this was not a problem at all, because among all those wishing to study, people with basic knowledge gained just as many as needed. For the rest, we advised starting with the basic programming basics (to learn what variables, methods are, write “Hello, world!” And come to us again).
Having gathered two groups of students (iOS and Android), we finally started classes. Classes are held with us, as I wrote above, in our relaxation room. In time, we thought that the most convenient would be a schedule of two evening classes per week, lasting 1-2 hours. However, as practice has shown, there are complex topics that sometimes do not even take two hours to do, so during the course of classes I had to rewrite the plan and break down some issues into two or more classes.
The lesson itself consists of a theoretical part, where the teacher explains the topic of the lesson and practical, using specific examples, where students are divided into pairs and perform 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, who still work with us and at some points have already outgrown their teachers.
This academic year, we again hope for replenishment in our ranks, moreover, in two directions at once.
And we are not going to stop there and are already starting to plan a new training format - the IT laboratory of web projects. If everyone is interested in it, we will write a short report about it too.
In the end, I would like to note that we are not the only ones who created their own school of developers. Other companies also have developer courses, both internal and at the local university. And 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 matter 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, this is about 90% of our software products. It has also historically developed that a large part of the development department is concentrated in Saransk. And which is quite logical, we faced the problem of staff shortages.
The simplest solution was to look for employees for a x2 salary, but surprisingly, even this method does not work; most of the people either sit in their place and do not want to change anything, or have left for large cities. There remains an option - we are preparing the frames ourselves. Of the advantages - the relatively low cost of new employees and initially high loyalty to the company. Of the minuses - the lack of experience on real projects.
Syllabus
The first step with which we began to implement our idea was to draw up a curriculum. It may seem that this extra bureaucracy is useless, but as the 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 missed in the past. It all started with the usual list of questions, which, as we thought, should be known to everyone who wants to engage in mobile development. For example, an iOS development plan started like this:
- Development Fundamentals. iOS, Xcode, HelloWorld
- Objective-C. The basics of the language. Operators Data types. Variables Arrays
- Objective-C. Classes, Fields, Methods, Properties
As you can see, the plan is designed for completely newcomers to programming, but during the classes we managed to interest more advanced students at this stage. In the future, this plan was described in more detail, for each lesson we thought out the practical part and now we are engaged in the fact that each lesson is described separately in a more detailed form. Perhaps someday this plan will grow into a good allowance.
Training
As for our spending. All the "investments" in the school of developers cost the purchase of two MacBook Air 13-inches and the time for lecturing, and the time cost more. As a room for training, we chose a relaxation 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, as I think, served as extra motivation for those who do not like student lectures and boring classes.
Student enrollment
The most crucial moment has come - we have placed announcements about the opening of the school. In a creative outburst, we even drew a logo for our school, which in turn made our ads more visible and interesting.
In the announcement of the requirements there was only a desire to learn and knowledge of the basic principles of programming. Those. our “student” is a senior university student who has done laboratory work in pairs and who still has a desire to leave for the profession. We placed announcements offline: in the buildings of technical faculties; and online: our VK group, an ad from which we asked to repost our friends (group of faculties and user-group of developers). As a result, according to our calculations, the coverage turned out to be quite large: several hundred views per day, which is a good result for a regional IT group.
Job interviews
And now letters began to come to us from e-mails from those wishing to study. There were several dozens of them on each platform. And the time has come to choose among them "worthy." For ourselves, we immediately determined that recruiting a dozen people - the wrong option, because mass education suffers from poor quality. Therefore, we decided for ourselves that a group of 4-5 people would suit us. One teacher can well control each student individually and students can always count on attention to themselves. In general, our goal was to choose the most suitable for us.
The interview consisted of a request to tell about yourself, about what experience in programming and why you want to start learning specifically mobile development.
As it turned out, this was not a problem at all, because among all those wishing to study, people with basic knowledge gained just as many as needed. For the rest, we advised starting with the basic programming basics (to learn what variables, methods are, write “Hello, world!” And come to us again).
Classes
Having gathered two groups of students (iOS and Android), we finally started classes. Classes are held with us, as I wrote above, in our relaxation room. In time, we thought that the most convenient would be a schedule of two evening classes per week, lasting 1-2 hours. However, as practice has shown, there are complex topics that sometimes do not even take two hours to do, so during the course of classes I had to rewrite the plan and break down some issues into two or more classes.
The lesson itself consists of a theoretical part, where the teacher explains the topic of the lesson and practical, using specific examples, where students are divided into pairs and perform 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, who still work with us and at some points have already outgrown their teachers.
This academic year, we again hope for replenishment in our ranks, moreover, in two directions at once.
And we are not going to stop there and are already starting to plan a new training format - the IT laboratory of web projects. If everyone is interested in it, we will write a short report about it too.
Total
In the end, I would like to note that we are not the only ones who created their own school of developers. Other companies also have developer courses, both internal and at the local university. And 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 matter and perhaps this will once again improve the personnel issue in our city and in our company in particular.