Hire an apprentice: Evolutionary learning at the 7digital technical academy

Abstract

Hiring senior software engineers with experience in Agile and Lean has always been difficult. Training university graduates or engineers from other backgrounds takes time and can cause disruption to software teams. 7digital addressed both of these problems by starting a Technical Academy; a 6 month programme of classroom sessions, pairing, deliberate practice, personal project work and guided learning. Backed by key metrics and qualitative data, the paper explores the positive impact that the technical academy has had on the technology team and wider organisation at 7digital. It investigates the changes in technique, curriculum and structure that the team made over the three iterations of the academy. It goes on to detail the challenges that the team faced around justifying the time away from usual activities, measuring the impact, attempting to predict the long term benefit and make the result of extra diversity in the team more apparent.