28. Apr 2021Insight

Talent is critical for any organization, learnings from iOS academy

Talent is critical for any organisation. I mean, who would disagree right? We, in GoodRequest, spend lot of effort and energy to expand our team. Not because we want to have big team, but because we want to solve big challenges and projects.

Tomáš LodňanCEO

iOS Academy for the future iOS Developers

One way or another hiring is hard and to be honest motivation for anyone to leave mostly well paid, well organized and well culture-oriented teams is really low. In the end of 2020, we decided with our iOS development team to prepare iOS academy in the beginning of new year. It's already few weeks this internal academy has finished, and I wanted to share couple of learnings we had.

Key takeaways:

you need to be ready that it sometimes fails and this was already our 3rd shot on this. The first one was long time ago. Second was in the summer 2020, not very successful. We had to end it up sooner. Last, third one was great,
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it takes lot of energy especially for team leaders and seniors in the team to create content and whole concept, so be ready they would not have not time for many other things,
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it's not easy to handle it if you have lot of commercial project happening in the same time, so rather plan for time you usually have less work. In our case it's right after Christmas,
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feedback is crucial so ask your team regularly. We set milestones on even on weekly basis,
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prepare ideally most of the program in advance. In our case it was 2 month long program and we did preparation of main modules and content in advance. So theory and live coding is ahead of practical assignments,
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be flexible, you might have talented fast-learners in the academy, so don't be afraid to speed up and change if your team is ready for it,
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it's rather long term investment that low hanging fruit, so don't expect to have 100% ready developers after 2 months,

students involved in the iOS academy from GoodRequest 2020

Amazing things happened thanks to awesome people

Well, I mean our academy trainees are just amazing, but you need to prepare good project after academy for them too. Now I would like to thanks especially Maroš and Dominik who make it happen. We will definitely repeat this academy since investing in future is what we see as important step to do. And even many companies are focusing on seniors only, we think creating opportunities for juniors is as important as hiring seniors to the team. What's your perspective?