Technical Training in the time of Coronavirus

With many programmers now working from home, management may be thinking this is an ideal time to offer training…or maybe not. Budgets may be slashed and shifting priorities may put training on the back burner. Either way, it is absolutely the right time to take advantage of this opportunity and consider training for some of your employees. In this brief article, I outline several steps to be sure you are making the right decision as well as several considerations as to the type of training that would most benefit those of your employees/developers that you have selected as candidates for training.

Should you offer developers training opportunities now?

Firstly, evaluate any training that has already been scheduled. Does the motivation that prompted that training request still exist? Are the scheduled attendees still available? If yes, move forward. If priorities have shifted consider rescheduling or retooling that training request to meet the current need. You may discover that the attendance for this training has shifted resulting in removing some attendees and adding others. Perhaps you now have idle developers working from home. In many cases, simply putting out the call to training yields surprising results. You may find developers extremely interested in advancing their skillsets from teams you had not considered.

Secondly, after evaluating the current priorities consider any gaps in knowledge that impede the progress of the new goals and agenda. Now you have identified a training need as well as potential trainees. Be sure to take both short and long-term views. The short-term tends to be the easier of the two as the long-term view is so unpredictable at this time. Nevertheless, the long-term view is extremely important because this is where you potentially gain a competitive advantage. Knowing where you would like to be by Q4 of 2020 and Q1 of 2021 will allow you to prepare during this current “down time.” No doubt, developers are catching up on technical debt, bug-fixes, new features, and general organizational development goals, but at the same time, budgeting with an eye toward future goals will yield great dividends.

What type of training should you offer?

Broadly speaking, companies today implement two basic types of training: formal and informal and both can be highly effective. Informal training typically takes place in the developers current environment with no formal preparation or learning materials. It is fluid and organic because it is self-directed or developer-led.

Formal training, on the other hand involves many factors including but not limited to professional trainer led delivery, focused preparation, dedicated time to conduct the training, time-boxed learning, and resources designed specifically for the training.

Informal Training

The most common implementation of informal training is on-site peer-to-peer training such as pair-programming and senior-to-junior developer mentoring and coaching. This is most often done on a one-to-one basis and is based on a developer with practical and extensive experience. However, it can also be done within a group with a senior developer sharing his or her knowledge with a group of developers as in a “lunch and learn” session. Absent of such an expert in your company, many training providers can deliver an expert that can share their knowledge with experienced programmers who need as much information about a new technology they can absorb delivered within a short period of time such as one to two days. This sort of informal training typically lacks any structure with the predominant amount of time being question and answer sessions. Thus, it is highly tailored to more experienced developers. 

While this form of training can be highly effective, some companies report that while the “leader expert” has a wealth of knowledge, they lack the ability to share that knowledge in an effective and cohesive manner. It is basically having an expert in the room who can tell developers “this is how I do it.” It lacks the purposeful approach I will explain in the formal training session below but is still a valuable tool under the right circumstances. 

The second most popular kind of informal training is self-study. The employee is given one or more resources and left alone to start the learning process. Resources include access to books and videos such as Safari Books Online or LinkedIn Learning. In most, but not all cases, there is no clear learning path and the developer is left to either start fresh or fill in the gaps in their knowledge through vetting and sourcing from the various resources provided. This too, can be effective and some developers prefer this method although it is arguably more time consuming. This form of learning is self-directed and that is often considered the up-side as the learner is motivated because they are in control of what they learn resulting in a greater probability of engaging the content consistently. On the down-side, unless that training is supported and regulated by a supervisor, the end result may be a team of developers with disparate skills sets who potentially may be executing the same tasks with different techniques.

Formal Training

This is where the professional trainer comes in. Because the trainer has been outsourced, there is no inherent bias in the techniques or architecture of the chosen language or framework. When done properly, the training becomes an opportunity for the development team to get an overarching, high-level overview of the technical material and then cherry-pick as a team the specific details of the training that best apply to their environment as well as their developers. Training providers specialize in this type of situation. After a detailed needs-analysis the training, delivered virtually, becomes a highly tailored, student-centric experience in which every detail from preparation to delivery has been carefully formulated to optimize the information delivered to the information consumed. This leaves the developer armed, confident and ready to tackle the companies new objectives. The “local” company expert is then in a better position to resume their role as leader/mentor to a group of developers who now have a better base knowledge and therefore a better ability to relate to the lead developer. This is the fundamental difference between a tech lead who has both experience and knowledge but perhaps lacks the ability and tools that a trained professional technical trainer provides.

Conclusion

Companies from all walks of business are experiencing varying levels of difficulty while navigating the pandemic and the challenges it brings. Wise business leaders will look past this to find opportunities. Training employees may be one of those opportunities.