A Trip to India

Let me share with you some notes about my recent trip to Goa, India for Infuse. My first trip abroad for work in a long long time (well since Covid anyway).

Why did I go?

Over the last few months I have been helping a brilliant young team in India put together a training program for Infuse to support their expansion plans. The company has been hiring at all levels but has specifically targeted bright young graduates to populate our academy so we can help develop them for both the company and help them achieve their own life goals. The graduates have been chosen for their attitude as much as academic achievement.

Our training program has many facets covering technical skills in key current technologies as well as behavioural, planning and enquiring techniques to enable all round growth. The main object being that we can place our academy resource anywhere internally within our product development teams or with clients and they will fit well and thrive.

As part of this I felt it was important that I should not only help the local team put together a comprehensive training program and run to tight timelines, but I also needed to interact with the academy intake myself and take on some of the training duties.

With this in mind, it became apparent that for this, Teams was not the way forwards. A trip to Heathrow followed by and Air India Jet to Goa was required.

This is a vibrant, wonderful place full of amazing scenery, with great beaches, food and polite people. A perfect place to develop a software business

What did I do?

I spent a little over 2 weeks with our September 2022 intake working on Agile Adoption models, automated functional test tooling, performance tooling as well as Agile and Test management tooling. We also found time to look at project management and consultancy techniques, the impact of various ISO standards and regulations on our work. All that in under 3 weeks? Well, I had an absolute blast. The academy guys worked very hard indeed, and amazingly still had huge smiles on their faces all the time.

What did we learn?

Well for myself, I reinforced this old mantra: Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

• I learnt that these young people are every bit as passionate as I am about engineering and also developing their careers at the same time.
• I learnt that I can always squeeze a little more out of them if I try and ask the right questions, and offer small bribes.
• I learnt that I need to change a few things round in our training program. And tailor it a little more for the intended career path of the individual. So that will keep me busy for a while
• Mostly they learnt that they can! Now, what was the question again?

While there, I also met our January 2023 intake who are just beginning their journey with Infuse and are deep in training on HTML, CSS, JS, DOM, Containers and gaining insight into several current programming languages. dont you just love IT? As soon as you think you have it cracked, there is loads more to find out about. What ever next, Chat GPT?

The future? I need to rejig some things for our next intake, sharpen my pen a little on the training I take myself. I am getting a bit rusty it seems.

But for the academy guys from September 2022, they are passing out with my seal of approval and blessings. They are cooked and ready to take on the world!