On Building an Awesome Software Development Training Program.
Hello once again, Ositadinma here. I’m sure that there are a lot of young people who have very young budding careers that are already frustrated by the fact that they don’t see all the results they anticipated at the moment. Well, I bring you good news from the stables of my very tumultuous, young, but glorious little career. I think patience is something that we all take for granted. Everything takes time — Everything. I’m going to let you guys in on how we built one of the best software internship programs in the country from nothing and how it took a lot of effort, learning, and time.
I joined the Tenece group in August of 2017 as a software developer. I was awarded intern of the year in the 2016 internship program, and as a result, was given automatic employment. When I joined the team, it was evident that there was a talent deficiency in the software department. This deficiency was due to the talent flight from regions such as the southeastern part of Nigeria to larger markets like Lagos. It was difficult to find anyone who wanted to stay back and build anything here. By the time I joined, I was impressed with the Tenece story. A brilliant “not so young” man decided to build a software company in Enugu — These are the crazy things we witness on God’s good earth from time to time. I was immediately fascinated by all the brilliant young people doing great deeds from this magnificent office situated in the middle of nowhere.
I resumed on a day I can’t remember in early August. I can say that I was a good PHP developer at the time. I was also able to hold my ground in .NET and some NodeJS, so I wasn’t doing badly. I honestly thought coding was what I wanted to do at the time. One sunny afternoon, Isky, who would later become my elder brother, friend, and mentor, called me to discuss my future at the company. He said, “I had a conversation with Sir K, and he thinks you shouldn’t be writing code. We are currently developing a talent acquisition strategy for our software operations. Will you like to be a part of it”? To date, I don’t know why I agreed, but it has been an exciting journey, and I’m glad I did.
When I left the software team in December, we had just begun operations at Genesys. Genesys, the newest child of the Tenece group, was going to help us rapidly improve our talent acquisition, development, and retention strategy. The first line of action was to improve the quality of our internship program to meet our talent acquisition goals, and guess what? I was told to get on it. Here I was, a fresher in the software industry, charged with discovering and training new software developers. Honestly, I had no idea what to do for the first two weeks. After getting my shit together, I took a look at all the knowledge resources that were used for the program the year before. After that, I had interviews with the previous coordinators to understand their successes, failures, gaps, and pain points. When the interviews were done, I was able to point out the areas I had to focus on if I was going to get it right.
Firstly, I decided to change the program structure. Instead of focusing only on training programmers, we designed the program to encompass the whole product development process. So, in addition to the programming courses, we introduced the product design, project management, and business development courses. I also realized some flaws in the recruitment system. Everything about it from the online application to the phone call interviews was perfect. The only issue was with the physical assessment. It consisted of an aptitude test and a behavioral analysis, so we didn’t have any way of ascertaining the technical abilities of prospective interns beyond what they were selling. I introduced the technical sprint and the personality assessment to ensure applicants met those baseline technical abilities and that they were perfect culture fits — We value our culture a lot at Genesys, it defines who we are.
Before taking charge of the Genesys internship program, I had never designed a training program. There was a lot I didn’t know. After coming up with my ideas on how to better the program, I hopped off to do some serious learning. I took courses in Learning & Development, Instructional Design, Software Education, Product Design, and Product Management. I was basically on a quest to gather all the knowledge I needed to set the ball rolling. I also realized that I couldn’t achieve all these things on my own. I couldn’t possibly facilitate all those courses since I wasn’t an expert in most of them — Heck! I had only about four months of professional experience as a software developer. I talked to my boss and facilitated the recruitment of some of my friends and coursemates from the university who interestingly, turned out to be some of the most excellent people in our system today. The point here is; you can’t do everything alone. You need people.
We recorded our first massive success with the recruitment. I stood there on the second day of the induction during the 2018 Genesys Internship Program, and I was proud of what I saw. Brilliant, opinionated, and passionate lads ready to do great deeds. What followed after was unexpected. The program started, and things began to fall apart. Some of the facilitators had other engagements. Some of the interns started on a rather unserious note. A lot of the things I had planned weren’t working exactly how I expected them. I was freaking out. After some sleepless nights, numerous cups of coffee, and some counseling sessions with my Oga at the top, I became a little more agile, adjusting, and making changes as problems arose. That first internship program was a huge learning curve for me. It taught me a lot about myself, other people, processes, and unexpected outcomes. We weren’t even able to execute the Bootcamp we had planned for the final phase of the program. I and everyone else was burnt out by the time we got there. But guess what? By the end of Build Season, we had achieved our expected learning outcomes. This meant that every intern had displayed beyond reasonable doubt, that they had acquired at least 85% of the skills they set out to learn!
In 2019, my second year of running the program, I decided to test and see if the internship program was stable enough to run on autopilot. Essentially, I was going to focus on building self-sustaining processes that required minimal human interference. I made some adjustments in the knowledge delivery system. We introduced E-Learning technologies to improve the learning autonomy of the interns rapidly. We also made adjustments to the curriculum. We reduced learner-facilitator interactions by increasing the number of learning resources and materials. These materials were carefully curated to ensure that they were straightforward to use and understand. As you can already imagine, we recorded huge successes. We also did a pilot test of the Virtual internship, which wasn’t very successful. But where is the fun in the journey if everything goes as planned? We licked our wounds, learned our lessons, and started working on a better virtual internship program for this year.
Looking back, I can say that I’m proud of what we have been able to achieve. We have 20 resident software developers on the Genesys Product team alone. Add to that another 10 in the Tenece software department who are all direct results of our internship program. Some of our past interns have found their footing in various software companies around the world. In the coming years, we intend to do a lot more to increase these numbers exponentially.
In the article, I highlighted some things that were very important along my journey. I’ll summarize them here.
- Learn from the past — Try as much as possible to learn from the mistakes of the people before you. While you’re at it, also discover the troubles they encountered. This exposition will help you consider things you’d normally overlook.
- Ideate — I know it has been said that no idea is original, but there’s nothing wrong with coming up with your way of doing things, even if it means you have to remix and improve other people’s ideas.
- Learn some more — If you notice that you have knowledge gaps, learn. Learn as much as you can.
- Test and see — Don’t be afraid to experiment. If you have a great idea and you aren’t sure it’s going to work, experiment! Who knows what great successes or failures lie beyond? Well, you’ll never find out if you don’t experiment
- Be agile — Always find ways to respond to change. Mike Tyson once said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Things won’t always work out as planned. You must learn to adjust appropriately and fix problems as they arise.
- Embrace failure — Not everything you do will end successfully. It is essential that you look at failure as an opportunity to learn and build better stuff.
- Be Patient — The truth is, everything takes time.
