Stop Preparing Developers; Grow Them
The demand for tech workers keeps increasing, but supply still falls well short. Many claim the way to get more developers is to dramatically shorten the pre-hire preparation window, commoditizing educational content as we scale it to the masses.
Unfortunately, this trend means the pool of developers employers choose from is increasingly filled with those who have quickly picked up some knowledge, but have not yet built experienced skills to match. Lack of readiness to work competently unsupervised is often painfully apparent shortly after hire, and leads to frustration among the team and distrust in the hiring process.
Managers face an enormous burden to fill in these gaps of highly compressed pre-hire education; they throw money at the skill shortcomings -- $1.4 billion in 2014 just in North America alone -- because business depends on solid tech worker skills. That money is often spent scattershot across various solutions, meaning there's little tracking of ROI, increasing waste and dissatisfaction. Current market solutions are simply mismatched to what employers really need and want.
Left unaddressed, these imbalanced market solutions will likely collapse, meaning the developer supply chain may dry up even more. Business leaders will keep looking to technology to fix these shortcomings. The danger to tech workers with beginner-level skills is they may be automated away. If you're not already an experienced developer, it'll become even tougher to catch up!
Until now, market solutions haven't focused their approaches to scaling education on sustainable roots and proven foundations, but rather on treating the symptoms.
The currently accepted models of worker preparation before hire -- dumping large amounts of knowledge upfront with relatively little practice -- does not work, and never has. Thousands of years of human history have proven: the only educational model that sustainably works is growing skills through continuous mentoring/ apprenticeship. In other words: turning knowledge into skill over time, on the job, through guidance and relationship accountability.
Pre-hire preparation is necessary, but for tech workers to grow real skills out of that head knowledge, learning must continue into the job and throughout their working career.
If we don't start to reshape developer education into mentoring industry wide, the future of tech workers is in jeopardy. DevGo is leading the way: we're growing and accelerating developers by scaling mentoring relationships in the work place.
Curious to learn more? See why businesses need mentoring for their developers. Then explore DevGo's modern mentoring model.
Senior Application Developer at Productive Edge
6 年This is so true, no wonder apprenticeships have been the model to bring students to mastery since time immemorial. The education system is broken and it's because people have a flawed understanding and relationship with it. Learning should be lifelong and this is especially true in the tech field. Like most things in life, it's about the journey rather than the destination and if people learn to become friends with the learning process they may find themselves enjoying the challenge. No one wants to work with someone who has the "just show me how to do it" attitude but the opposite is true as well. Erudite coworkers who are too good to spread the wealth of knowledge breed resentment and hurt team morale. The ideal is a balance where teams have dynamic vulnerability and submissiveness to alternate student and teacher roles since everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Creating a system of mentors will help teams bring in knowledge but proper teamwork mentality will still be needed to make the best use of it and spread it around.