#2 Technical community: how to train with its colleagues ?
How do you train with your colleagues? This is a question that Technology Partner's management tries to answer every month.
In this article you will find out why Technology Partner wants to create a technical community of its employees. How did they do it? By organizing monthly technical lunches.
What about in-house technical community ?
We believe that this is an advantage for both the "trainer" and the "trainees". We find that employees are more engaged when one of their own is training them. Their attention span and concentration during the training is better since each technical session usually ends with questions, demos and inevitably discussions.
You also must consider the pedagogical side because "you can only teach when you have acquired the gift of synthesizing your knowledge."
The technical communities must also allow us to support and to create links with the new collaborators who have joined us. But also, to strengthen those already present with other colleagues. As Technology Partner is an IT services company, some of our employees are at customers' sites and do not see each other very often.
How many technical trainings have already been organized?
The first internal community was organized when we were still part of the Linc group, and it was in June 2018.
Since 2019, we have tried to do it regularly, that is, at least once a month. Despite the Covid 19 crisis where we had to pause physical events, we have held about 20 training sessions.
What types of technical topics did your employees discuss?
Since Technology Partner is on the Microsoft Stack, our employees prefer to address topics on this technology. The advantage is that they can then find solutions to blockages on customer projects. We have been trained on Micosoft Azure DevOps, ASP.Net : Blazor or Sql server Advanced.
However, some of our employees have decided to tackle more fashionable topics like Clojure.
But still, others wanted to talk about the technologies they use outside of work, for personal projects for example. We could learn about Flowable or Unity VR.
It's very important for us to support them in tech training and to allow connections between employees.
Do you also offer other types of tech training to your teams?
In addition to monthly technical communities, we offer external training to our teams.
As needed for customer projects, we train our employees on the necessary topics. The smooth running of the project is essential to keep motivation high, so what's worse than being stuck? For example, 4 of our employees have followed a multi-day Kubernetes training in 2021.
For 2022, we will also offer other types of training. We have identified the need for language training and to support them, we will offer it to our employees.
Written by Charline Pennisi