 A critical step of the training and education process is to provide hands-on experience . When the initial training is complete your staff is ready to begin applying their new skills. It is at this point that many organizations run into trouble because they mistakenly believe that their staff now has the skills necessary build modern software on their own. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Would you send somebody to a couple of accounting courses and give them control of your organization’s finances? Would you send somebody to a couple of marketing courses and put them in charge of your advertising campaign? Would you somebody to a couple of law courses and then have them defend you in court? Of course not. Therefore, why would you send somebody to a couple of development courses and expect them to develop mission-critical software with their newfound skills? The bottom line is that a couple of weeks of training is only a couple of weeks of training.
Our experience is that the mentoring effort should be performed on a development project, one in which the trainee is given the opportunity to apply and evolve the skills that they received during training. Mentors should participate as active members of your project team, not just as teachers. For a mentor to be a productive member of the team you will need a ratio of one mentor for every two or three novices, anything more and the mentor will be too busy mentoring to get anything done on your project. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as there are other experienced people available to develop the complex portions of your application. Project teams consisting of one expert and a large number of novices are likely to run into trouble.
Ronin mentors are senior developers experienced in object and Java technologies as well as agile software development techniques. They can guide your developers through the learning process, showing them how to use modern development techniques. The goal of Ronin mentors is transfer knowledge to your staff as quickly as possible.
Take the next step and “seed” your teams with proven industry experts to help jump-start your efforts. Ronin provides experts in the RUP®, EUP, XP, object-oriented development, J2EE, and other methodologies and techniques. Our goal is to transfer our knowledge to your staff to create a self-sufficient team without long-term contractor requirements.
Contact Ronin for more information about our approach and how it can work for you. Ronin also provides software development and training in leading edge technologies and techniques.
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Mentoring