Building a curriculum for industry

To ensure a curriculum relevant for industry we surveyed over one hundred Engineering Managers, Heads of Engineering and CTOs - "What would you expect to see on an aspirational, disruptive junior curriculum?"

Top of their wish list, "effective team members" and "communication."

In academia, achievement, with the odd exception is largely individualistic which is a stark contrast that anything worth doing in industry is achieved in a team.

Quite often Pair Programming in an interview scenario will be their first experience of working on a problem with someone else (which we aim to address in the Basecamp community!)

In the early years of your career all your mental energy should rightly be focused on improving yourself; reading, writing, presenting and constantly being pushed out of your comfort zone.

Eventually, you will have sufficient skills and confidence to lift your head up, and start to be curious about the team and department around you. The Circle of Impact (shown above) is a nice simple model that can be mapped to confidence, seniority and even organisational hierarchy.

Why teams over individuals? Well, Junior's need support to learn and grown by osmosis. They will get stuck, and after a period of time they will need a shoulder to tap. That is the beauty of the Software Engineering apprenticeships, the opportunity to both learn and apply knowledge.

This also extends to individual Senior Developers acting as a bottleneck to getting work done, a bus factor of one. (Bus factor being how many people in your org need to be hit by a bus to cause business continuity issues!)

The Phoenix Project is a seminal novel on business agility. Brent being the all-knowing, individual Senior Developer.?

"Oh, come on. Brent. Brent, Brent, Brent! Can't we do anything without him?"

Maybe you've come across your own Brent in your career. You may even have a Brent in your current org!

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It wasn't a surprise to see Communication on the list of desired skills for Juniors. Communication being a primary value of XP Programming developed by Kent Beck in 1996 and "Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project" being a key principle of the Agile Manifesto. Obviously, Juniors and Apprentices need to learn the technical skills, but it's the human skills that will help them navigate problems and deliver business value.

It's a fair argument that juniors already have a high cognitive hill to climb but leaders also told us that although technologies change fast, principles and practices stand the test of time; Deliver little and often, prioritise working software, challenge assumptions, find the bottlenecks, KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid.)?

We believe such principles and mental models will set our apprentices and juniors up to succeed in an ever-changing tech landscape. To help them further we have aligned our industry curriculum around three three consistent threads: People, Tech and Process.

We are fortunate in the S&A Academy to deliver Team Lead (Level 3) and Senior Manager (Level 7) apprenticeships, the equivalent of a master’s degree, so we have a wealth of content to level up effective communication in our People thread.

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The second stage of SummitToTech is Ascend, a curriculum designed for industry by industry delivered with an instructor led bootcamp or as part of an apprenticeship. Spaces are available for both from April 2024.

Send S&A Academy a DM if interested and let us know in the comments "What principles and foundational knowledge would you want a junior to cover?"