5 Steps to Transforming Tech Freshers Into Beautiful Art

By Naveen S R

Often companies chase for a high talent density. Recruit the best talent and retain the best. Having a deep talent pool creates a self-perpetuating cycle of increasing productivity. Intellectual conversations, learning by osmosis and dynamic collaborations build up a high-performance culture.

However, this experience has become an ideal world scenario that seems to be a little out of reach. When the times are tough with the pandemic, people losing jobs, pay cuts, and certain sectors like travel probably being the most hit has made it extremely difficult to attract talent.

Ironically, there are so many folks graduating every year from college and who continue to struggle to find that first job. Just in one state like Karnataka in India which is an IT Hub we have over 1,000,000 students graduating every year. Think about the rest of the 29 states in India and across the 195 countries around the globe.

What if we could stitch these two scenarios together and we may be able to look at a middle ground to build talent density.

We would like to share an airasia.com case study of our success story with training a group of freshers in January 2020.

I am sure many folks share this problem and wanted to provide a curation of training packs built over the last few years to transform fresh graduates from college to stunning talent and build the talent density from scratch.

When we recruit talent the most important criterion in my opinion is the attitude, the willingness to learn and adapt. I was once a Flash developer and what I learned from being one is that never keep all eggs in one basket and go full-stack. Whatever is cutting edge today becomes obsolete someday. As my mentor Shreeni once taught me, first, build the competency to excel and technical skills can always be picked up along the way. The theme of our training pack takes after this wisdom.

Step 1: Icebreaker

Freshers are like newborn cubs, running everywhere, with so much energy and excitement. It is good to have icebreaker games on the first day to get each one comfortable, introduced in fun ways, and setting an environment of positivity. Few recommended icebreaker games include Dancing Names, Back to back dancing, and Ask a Question.

Step 2: Set the view

From the analogy from the book “The seven habits of highly effective people” -

A photographer sees an entire landscape through a wide-angle lens to get the larger picture such as the entire view of a mountain. A Telephoto lens helps to get the focus on the smallest of objects such as insects or a dewdrop on a leaf. A standard lens helps get a portrait done.

Setting the larger picture for the year, from the company mission to the learning path of each fresher helps know the path ahead. Most people look at life from a telephoto lens living hour to hour or day to day. However, it is recommended to set the context for a week on week basis for the training period. This helps to course correct or catch up over weekly reviews, provide newcomers the ability to moderate over a week on various activities, and manage time at their discretion. An onboarding document is a good hand out with people to meet, coach, collaboration platform details, etc.

Step 3: Piggy Bank Of Questions

Most of the time you have a fresher taken around the floor and being introduced to every individual. However in my experience just after that event, the newcomer cannot remember any name. To be good at what we do know and learning the domain is probably the next most important thing. Putting these two together, what we have done is to provide freshers a question bank of all core domain questions relevant to the product. They are tasked to interact with various individuals from different teams and find the answers. This exercise also teaches each one how to navigate and get time from others besides the ability to paraphrase and understand the learnings from the interaction.

Step 4: Technical Learning Path

Going wide takes precedence over going deep during the training period. Every individual is handed out a real-world product use case scaled down to several notches. The context is set for weekly goals. Every week builds on top of the previous one.

Week 1 is all about the favorite hello world of the tech, understanding just enough of the tech stack.

Week 2 is about debugging an IDE of choice and learning to troubleshoot problems.

Week 3 is to take the code to the cloud with industry DevOps practices.

Week 4 is for sharpening the skill set and diving deeper into the tech stack to meet the product use case.

Week 5. Put things together with your peers. Eventually, it would be a layered architecture, so more than one individual would need to talk to each other and get the solution tied together to deliver the product use case.

Step 5: Learning Group

The team of newcomers presents the learnings from the piggy bank questions and the tech topics to the learning group. The learning group asks questions and learns from each other. It is a divide and conquer approach to learn. At the end of the session, all participants provide feedback to the presenter with positive intent.

The newcomers learn the etiquette to set up meetings over calendar invites. By giving the feedback at the end of the session we have seeded the culture to open conflicts and transparency. The review also helps the presenter have a reality check and course correct.

Bonus Step: Going The Extra Mile

This section delves a little deeper into the core competency-building sessions that we ran as part of Step 4 (Technical Learning Path). These sessions included:

1. Journey to the peak of the mountain — A storytelling exercise with a moral of teamwork and effectiveness of learning groups.
2. Decision-Making Games — A bunch of situations where there is no right or wrong but how criteria help to make a decision. The key takeaway is how to be empowered with all the information and be able to make the best bet.
3. Know, Know Off and the Grey Matter — A session that focuses on how to tap into what we know, be able to figure out problems with what we know, and approaches to tackle problems that we have no clue about.
4. Being a Leader — Seed the spirit of a leader to care for the team beyond self.
5. Asking the right questions — We encourage our team to opine and challenge the status quo. Always understanding the Why is an important first step. One of the main reasons why freshers fail is also the inhibition to ask questions. This session focuses on breaking the fear, breaking that imaginary boundary holding people’s thoughts and opinions.
6. Paraphrasing — A session that focuses on a technique to explain what is understood after a conversation or a meeting. There is always a gap in what is communicated to what is understood. This technique is useful to ensure and validate understanding.
7. Time Management — A typical day on the job always involves managing time. With a high velocity, the high-performance team is successful by managing the time. Techniques to choose the big rock and understand what has the maximum positive impact is taught in this session.
8. Bread, Butter, Jam — A session that focuses on how to differentiate mundane work, to optimizing work to foster innovation.
9. How to make money — A rhetorical session that focuses on chasing competency. Also, the session focuses on covering basic hygiene to get a life cover, medical cover, and cashflow quadrant.
10. Success, Fun, and value of the opportunity — A closing session to help coach on diverse topics and enable the psychological safety net.

And finally, Graduation Day!

After the training week which typically spans about a month, the coach spends time chilling out with the newcomers and we take them out for lunch and celebrate the learning ramp.

Seeding to the sprint cycles

Upon completion of training we then hand them out to mentors and our sprint cycles. Mentors now assist in polishing the tech skills. There are regular touchpoints to review the progress and focus to make each one independent and proficient.

This training pack has helped us transform freshers from blank slate to beautiful art. We have success stories of folks who started with the Hello World program and own a complete platform within a year such as this — https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/success-story-cosmos-platform-naveen-s-r/

There could be a laundry list of accomplishments in one’s life ranging from materialistic gains or success defined by products rolled out, however, I feel there is no better than having the ability to inspire and build careers that can transform individuals’ life. I am so happy to have been able to inspire and transform many in my journey!