The One with an Apprenticeship Kickoff

We want to further promote some kind of apprenticeship/training programm in our department and yesterday was our kickoff meeting. There were some topics that were discussed that all fall under this wider concept but have some differences:

• we want to see if we can build on my apprenticeship program to make it accessible for a wider audience
• we are looking for better ways to integrate new employees into the company and into our teams
• we think that very junior people will need a different onboarding path than people who have been working in software development for a while
• we want to find a good way for everyone to keep learning and improving, in their own field of work or in others
• we will have an intern from a technical college in the summer and want to provide a good experience for him

We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of having lots of tiny modules that people can choose freely from vs. a few set paths that people can move along. We also spent some time talking about the words “mentor” and “expert” and why they might not be so good. We will have “contact persons”. And we decided that we need more information from the student intern to craft some kind of internship program for him.

Our first step to get this program started now is to collect some resources for a few topics, with each of the people attending as a contact person for one topic. Other people can then use these resources on their own or with the topic’s contact person and ask this person for more guidance. The first topics will be Elixir, Ruby, Software Architecture, Productivity and Studitemps.

My topic is productivity and although I chose the topic name on my own, I’m not yet sure if it fits. I plan to provide some resources for working/prioritising better on ones own or in a team (the XP book is an obvious choice here) but also for mindfulness, stress management and maybe communication as well. These things fall into two of my own categories (communication and agile methods) and I don’t even think these category names are well chosen. I don’t like calling it something like “soft skills” though. Maybe I’ll come up with a better name once I have worked on it a bit.