Mentoring and Training New Hires

Although, there was no one project that stood out while at this position, with my primary duties initially being front-end development, I was briefly afforded the opportunity to on-board and train a pair of new-hires. These positions were all filled by students, both undergrad (like I was at the time) and graduate students. A few months after I had been hired on, 2 additional students, both in the graduate program at the time, were brought on to the team. We were making an effort include Angular into our workflow, a framework to which we were all unfamiliar. During this time, I was tasked with both learning this framework and ensuring that the two new hires were also coming up to speed in both our general duties as well as with Angular. I went about this by setting aside a roughly 30-minute session 3 times a week as a means to introduce a new topic or to address any specific questions they might have.

After a few days, however, it had become apparent that the knowledge base between the two were drastically different. One of the hires picked up new concepts quickly, was proactive in asking questions and finding solutions to problems, and generally needed very little over site. The other, however, did struggle with basic programming concepts such as conditional statements and iteration. As a result, two very different training regimens were developed to try to bring both new hires up to speed. This experience will play a very pivotal role in a few years later when I take on a role at Netapp and help design and lead training sessions to introduce our product team to the Python Language. I will have taken from this the need to gauge all participants prior knowledge of the subject and to take into account the varied results in an effort to create a single set of trainings that cover all necessary areas and backgrounds.