How GO-JEK Learns From Football Academy to Produce World Class Talents
World class football clubs have multiple line of attacks to get world class talents. On top of recruiting players from other clubs, they groom their young talents in their academy. They go around the world to scout high potential young players, put them in rigorous training programs, and integrate them with the senior team. This system helps clubs like Barcelona, Juventus, and Manchester United to continuously produce quality players in a sustainable way.
On the other industry, tech companies are struggling to acquire world class talents. This forces companies to engage in a talent war and often become time destructive to the industry. But here at GO-JEK, we prefer doing something more constructive and sustainable.
Inspired by the football academy, we are wondering…
Can we apply the principles of football academy to produce world class talents?
This inspires us to build….
Go-Academy operates like football academy but for tech talents. To be more precise, we start with software engineers. We go all around Indonesia to scout high potential programmers, put them in our intensive program, and integrate those who are ready for our engineering team. Our vision is to produce more world class talents in Indonesia’s tech industry that can help Indonesia to leapfrog into digital era.
Our ongoing programs
We are extremely lucky to collaborate with our counterparts from India. There, the tech ecosystem is more mature than Indonesia. They have a lot of practices that are not common compared to here. Most of the practices we do in Go-Academy is the outcome of the knowledge that they have been experimenting for the past 10 years. This collaboration leads to the birth of three programs:
1. Tech Campus Engagement
Target audience: university students with tech background.
What we do: We deliver hands on workshop covering wide variety of industry practices such as Clean Code, Test Driven Development, Design Pattern, Micro services, CI/CD, and DevOps. On top of that, we provide sharing sessions on Android, iOS, Product Management, Data Science, UX Design, Cracking Coding Interview, and lesson from Silicon Valley. To bring the student’s knowledge into reality, we assign them a final project to build one of GO-JEK’s product from scratch.
What we have done so far: For our pilot program, we collaborated with Faculty of Computer Science University of Indonesia and Bina Nusantara Computer Club. We are looking forward to scaling this initiatives by collaborating with more universities. Interested to collaborate with us? Fill the form HERE.
2. Tech Internship (GO-SQUADS TECH Program)
Target Audience: Third and fourth year university students with tech background.
What we do: We start with a one week boot camp, we filled the contents with our industry’s best practices taught by our senior engineers. After that, our interns work on exciting, impactful, and complex tech projects using Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Docker, LXD, Golang, Ruby, Kafka, and other cutting edge technologies. During the program, they work in pair and get hands on guidance from our engineers. The Go-Academy team also help them to develop other skills to collaborate effectively
What we have done so far: We have had two batches for interns in software engineering. Wanna hear some stories from our interns? Find it HERE. We will open more batches in the future, including during the December break. Pssst…. Aside of software engineers, we also open internship program for Business Intelligence Team. Find out more about it HERE.
3. Tech Apprenticeship
Target Audience: software engineers with less than three years of working experience.
What we do: We create six month program to transform aspiring software engineers into industry ready ones.
For the first three months, students will work on complex technology projects. After they finished, the will continue to develop skills writing clean code, Test Driven Development, Design Pattern, CI/CD, Container, Mobile Development, UX Design, and Data Science in our engineering bootcamp for the next three months. At the end of program, students will be considered for filling in a full time position at GO-JEK Group Engineering Team.
What we have done so far: For the first batch, we have six students that are now placed in GO-JEK’s Bangalore office, GO-LIFE, Midtrans and GO-TIX. if you are interested to apply, click HERE.
Our Philosophy
As time goes by, we will iterate our programs to achieve more optimal outcome. The format of our programs might change but, there are three important philosophies that we will always keep.
1. In Depth
In fast pace technology industry, things change really fast. Tools that are very popular this year might be obsolete next year. Therefore, we need talents who can thrive in new context such as team, tools, programming language, and more. In order to achieve that, we believe that an engineer has to have strong fundamentals in software engineering.
To achieve that, we give strong emphasis on fundamentals instead of language or tool specific knowledge. We start by giving very simple problem to solve. The goal is to give our students an avenue to practice on the surface level. Once they have mastered the basic content, we move on to the more complex problem. This method will help students to learn step by step to achieve mastery.
2. Engaging
Based on adult learning theory, adult learns best when they involve in the learning process. In our program, students will spend significant amount of time in writing codes. When they are stuck, our engineers will provide guidance. It needs to be highlighted that a guidance is different than spoon feeding. At the end of the day, we want our students to be an independent problem solver :)
On top of writing codes, we want our students to participate actively in group discussion. Students are encouraged to share their opinions, challenge each other (in a constructive way), and ask questions if they have doubts. This habit will help them to collaborate effectively when they are working in the team.
3. Up to date
Since the context keeps changing, we constantly provide business and technical insights for our students. For business insights, we invite product managers, business leaders, or even our co-founders to share about our business landscape. In one of the occasion, we had Nadiem Makarim spent half day to share his story about building GO-JEK from the garage until it becomes Indonesia’s First Unicorn.
For technical insights, we usually invite engineers across teams to share the projects they are working on. We have data science team teaching our students about statistic and machine learning. After the event, students are asked to build fake GPS detector by leveraging our real data set. By giving students real experience about solving real problem, they get some sense about the scale of their work and type of problem they will face in the future.
At the end of the program, our students will have strong fundamentals, able to collaborate, and understand both technical and business context.
What’s next?
We just get started. We plan to scale our programs so we can reach more students across Indonesia. If you are interested to apply to one of our program, check our website www.go-jek.com/go-academy . Got questions? Email us at academy@go-jek.com .
