Training a developer
I have noticed lately that good training in Flex seems to be in high demand. That can only mean that Flex is becoming more and more popular.
There is a shift in the way people and especially companies lately are looking at the way they are learning things. Previously someone trying to learn or become more proficient in a particular technology was just looking for different articles over the internet or search on forums for some help. The companies, of course, were expecting to see this behavior in their employees. There is no doubt that all this are still good practices, however they are not always offering the best solution to the learning problem. There is always something that you can not learn from the internet, some tips and tricks, some best practices and if the company does not have a senior developer, a good tech lead to teach all this to the others, these skills will be acquired the hard way (by braking things) and that is not the best solution.
Here comes training.
For a company, sending people to training is like renting all that important good tech lead. Usually this is a very good thing and if this effort is backed up by a good corporate environment that is encouraging people to also learn on their own, you end up with high quality developers (axiom: the company hired good people with great potential for development).
That’s right. Especially on the Flash / Flex / AIR where is hard to get a good programmer right at the first interview because these are relatively new development tools. You don’t get them in the school, you have to work hardly alone to get them so the only big way to have good programmers in a company is by training. Pack of 6 at a time, that’s how we do it at EyePartner, get them from the school with a basic knowledge of programming, OOP those stuffs and teach them Flex, AIR. In 6 months they end up in production.
Adrian.
And do you contact professional trainers or all the training is done in house?
All in house. We have some Adobe Certified that take the lead for 6 months in the school getting the students ready for production work.
Adrian.
Which are the universities you are working with? And how did you started this program inside the school?
I’d say we are working with the universities in Iasi, thats where the guys are coming from. The actual training is not in the university, its in our office here in Iasi. We have space reserved for the school, arround 10 pc’s. How we do it is that we post job announcement saying we need some skilled programming guys then from all the CV’s we select some to come to the testing. From those that come to the testing we select the best to start the training with. Until now all of them passed the training into production, unless they quit from a non-technical reason. Of course there are a lot benefits from both sides in this matter.
We figured this out because there aren’t so many skilled Flex / AIR programmers around here, and we need them bad as 50% from our company is based on Flex / AIR. The other half is a mixture between PHP and JAVA (LiveCycle Data Services).
Adrian.