Equipping new hires with programming best practices for a major telco

Need to ramp up the programming skills of new hires

A major Philippine telco was working on multiple products and needed to hire many developers. They were working on projects that involved digital payments and had to act quick to remain competitive. The plan was to hire 20 Java developers and to make sure that they employed sound engineering practices once onboard.

Dan, the head of development, knew that there is a disconnect between what computer science students learn in school and what is practiced in the real world. He wanted to make sure that these fresh graduates were equipped with the right skills before doing any programming work for the company.

Dan also advocates Agile development and wanted to make sure that his staff understood their way of developing software.

On top of this, the telco recognized the importance of evaluating the performance of each programmer. They wanted a tool that the company’s management and HR team can use to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each employee, and identify which team members can assume leadership roles.

One month customized programming bootcamp coupled with a platform for skills evaluation

Orange and Bronze had been working with the telco as software development consultants. The telco was well aware of O&B employees’ skills, and the rigid training program each programmer is required to attend before being deployed in any project. They wanted to replicate the discipline they witnessed firsthand from their O&B counterparts.

The company employed O&B to develop a training program for their team through O&B University. O&B customized the training modules according to their specific needs – this included the Java Bootcamp, AWS training, and an Agile methodology workshop, among others. The month-long program was culminated with a final exam – a machine problem that echoed the project that the team will be working on.

O&B used its Skills Evaluation Toolkit, an evaluation platform that provided the client with individual grades, assessment, and feedback on work attitude. This was a good starting point to gauge each trainee’s skill level and was useful for setting performance expectations.

Increased productivity through application of programming best practices

The telco’s development team currently practices what they learned from the month-long training. The program proved to be effective in producing disciplined Java software developers – the client booked the following year’s batch of new hires to go through the same program.

The O&B Skills Evaluation Toolkit also provided better insight to the client’s project managers and team leads on how to improve the performance of each software engineer. With the provided metrics, they are able to determine the next steps for each individual – be it additional learning resources, other training modules, or mentoring – for further skills enhancement.