Course "Industrial PHP Development". How to teach a turkey to fly?

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Attention!
This post is about our course and is essentially an advertisement.
In addition, we want to find out what, in general, people want to learn and in what form.
In order to avoid minuses in karma and respecting the norms of the habrasociety, we immediately warn about this, despite the fact that we publish it only on our blog :))
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When I and my partners worked as directors in digital agencies, we had a constant problem with search for developers. Even if you find a person who speaks very confidently at an interview, the most interesting part begins in the first working days.

Where did the idea of ​​the course come from

It often happened that a person who claimed to be even a leading developer did not actually know the basics of teamwork with business projects. And this is not only the fault of the specialist himself, but also of his previous employers, where the development was carried out according to the AdHoc management methodology.

As a result, our team leaders and technical dirams had to spend several weeks teaching a person what we considered the basics:

• using version control system
• work with three-tier architecture test-stage-prod
• general principles of teamwork

A number of executives of Internet companies say roughly similar words to us, which is why we decided to take a short course of immersion in industrial PHP development .

Details about the program, teacher and course format you can read on his page. I will dwell briefly on the most interesting:

• The course consists of two lessons with an interval of a week
• In the first lesson, theoretical knowledge is given, laboratory work is carried out, a large homework is given
• A week-long break between classes is just needed to complete the DZ
• The second lesson is devoted to the analysis of homework and questions that arose during the application of knowledge. In the remaining time there will be bonus labs.

How to teach a turkey to fly?

We recently found a good parable about education:
“Once, one turkey decided to make courses for other turkeys so that they could learn to fly. The first version of the courses consisted of theoretical studies. Graduates left after classes on foot. In the second version of the courses, the turkeys really tried to fly around the audience. But after class they left again on foot. ”

We want our graduates to fly after the courses. That is why we made a format in which the homework on the application of new knowledge and its subsequent analysis is an obligatory part of the master class. Firstly, the inevitability of public speaking and parsing homework motivates people to do it well and show themselves well done. Secondly, after completing the DZ, people have specific questions for the teacher. This is a very important point, because usually students have very few questions for the coach, and they are somehow abstract. And all the most interesting in education is conveyed precisely in random backstage conversations, in the analysis of practical subtleties. We decided to give people room for conversation and to make behind-the-scenes conversations a natural part of the class.

In general, in our opinion, wisdom is applied knowledge, realized after application.
We are for wisdom, and knowledge can also be viewed on Wikipedia for free :)

Feedback

Our course for team leaders is more of a management project, so Industrial PHP is our first course for developers. Please tell me in the comments or to me at g@kursrik.ru:

• What do you think is wrong with this course, is it doubtful or not at all?
• Is the format of short intensions convenient or do the developers not believe this and do you need long marathons?
• What topics are most acute in terms of training?

Our company is small, so we are very flexible and can quickly respond to the interests of the people, look for the right trainers and prepare useful courses.