At Big Nerd Ranch, we have some strongly held beliefs about how people best learn new technical practices. Some of the central tenets of our teaching philosophy include: 

• Assume no prior knowledge but infinite intelligence 

• Students learn best when they have dedicated time and space for learning 
• Students can learn more, more quickly when we take away distractions and focus them on learning 
• An expert guide provides the best pathway to new knowledge frontiers 
• Students need to interact with a topic in multiple ways to most effectively learn it 
• Adults learn best when they start with specific knowledge and then generalize from it, rather than the other way around 

These have all been a critical part of our teaching practice for over twenty years and they will continue to be for any training we deliver. In the past, we even held some more ‘extreme’ positions like: 

• Student resources need to be printed on paper, actual paper 
• In-person training is always the best way to learn 
• Training should always be done in a physical in-person setting 

These last few are a bit tongue-in-cheek. As one must, we have evolved our beliefs as the world of learning has changed. What we’ve always cared about, more than any of the specifics, is that our students learn as much as possible as efficiently as they possibly can. We want them to have an unforgettable experience that they want to tell their friends and colleagues about. That’s how we’ve managed to stay around so long in the rapidly evolving world of technology. 

After experiencing all of the ups and downs of the last five years, it’s probably less surprising that we would embrace a new way of training students. After all, the pandemic forced us to become a live-virtual training company overnight. Technology evolutions and our own growth have seen us branch out from our mobile core into new technologies and domains such as React, Golang, and Machine Learning. 

Why try blended? 

Our blended-learning experiment stems from the same culture of learning and innovation that has propelled us from our earliest days through now as a part of a global experience, design, and technology consultancy (Stellar Elements). 

So why are we offering our SwiftUI course as a blended experience? 

The main drivers are our students and clients. We have the opportunity to work with leading companies from all over the world. Those companies are evolving, and so are their attitudes toward learning delivery. Our clients and students have told us pretty clearly that they want to have learning delivery options that provide flexibility and that enable them to learn while continuing to meet their day-to-day responsibilities. 

Also, we believe in creating unforgettable learning experiences, and blended learning allows us to accomplish that goal in a way that is authentic to who we are and what we believe about students and learning. Quite simply, human learning needs a human touch. Learning modalities such as eLearning and video have their place, but to really learn a new skillset or to make a significant leap requires a more immersive and intensive approach with the guidance of an expert mentor. Blended learning combines the best elements of both worlds to create a cohesive and effective learning environment that allows students the flexibility to do some learning at their own pace while also giving them expert access, instruction, and interaction along the way. 

Lastly, blended learning has a capacity for scale that we are eager to embrace so that we can accommodate more students and can provide more expert access to quality technical training. In turn we can offer the course at a lower price, which makes it more accessible to students and increases its overall value for the price. 

What can you expect from a BNR blended-learning experience? 

We have crafted our blended experience based on a lot of research, trial and error, and learnings from our entire history. It’s geared toward giving students the best learning experience we can. 

 Here’s what to expect: 

• Weekly content unlocks
  • Recorded video introducing the week and its lesson plan
  • Recorded lectures for each topic (3-5 per week)
  • Assessments for reach topic to build confidence and check progress
  • Hands-on exercises to cement and build on the lessons
• Live Q&A sessions
  • Live sessions where instructors answer student questions and lead discusssions
  • Opportunity to submit questions ahead of time
  • Run twice per week
  • Recorded and made available to students
• Live mob programming sessions
  • Runs once per week to organically bring together the topics from the week
  • Goals are to:
    • Reinforce topics by seeing them used in other examples
    • Provide another forum for people to ask questions
    • Touch on additional topics that might not be covered in the canonical course content, but are interesting or useful for the project getting built
  • Recorded and made available to students as additional study aids
• Peer discussion and feedback
  • The instructor facilitates and encourages students to share their challenge solutions with each other for critique and discussion
  • Students have a shared chat space to discuss and share ideas and questions with each other as well as the instructor
  • Students join our Alumni Community for continued discussion and connection after the course

Come join us! 

This carefully crafted experience is geared toward helping you to understand what’s possible and giving you the confidence to explore more. I hope we’ve gotten you interested in what blended learning can offer you and/or your team. Come join us on our inaugural journey into blended learning with our upcoming SwiftUI course. It starts on September 20 (less than a month away) so register now!

The post Big Nerd Ranch and blended learning: why?  appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

Big Nerd Ranch has made our name in Mac and mobile. We were the first to have a comprehensive method for teaching Mac programming, iOS programming, and Android programming. Our deep knowledge of these technologies, forged through real client experience, coupled with our deep empathy for students and how they learn, has allowed us to help thousands of individuals and hundreds of companies to build their own native mobile applications. We think of ourselves as a friendly guide, helping our students solve problems one-by-one until they eventually develop a deep and comprehensive understanding of how to build a quality application that will hold up over the long term. 

The transition to mobile involved a massive shift in capabilities and mindset. Designing and building for the small screen was new to most, so they needed comprehensive and high-qualiity training to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by this new technology. Big Nerd Ranch was able to train digital staff from across the spectrum, showing them what was possible with this new technology and giving them the confidence to build and explore more. 

It worked. We have been able to train and guide digital companies that have gone on to become household names: Nextdoor, Facebook, just to name a couple. These companies, and many like them, leveraged our training to catapult themselves into the mobile and digital age, often seeing incredible results from their efforts. 

Still mobile – now machine learning  

Mobile continues to be a critical component of every company’s digital strategy, and we continue to dedicate ourselves to enabling individuals, teams, and organizations in the mobile space. Over the past few years, we have seen that machine learning and artificial intelligence have become the latest frontiers in the digital landscape. Aside from all of the recent news about AI and ML, we know they are prevalent because our clients have increasingly looked to incorporate these technologies into their digital products. Like mobile technologies, machine learning offers an entirely new set of tools with which designers, product owners, and engineers can bring their ideas to life. And like mobile technologies, there is currently a wide gulf between the promise the technology holds and the knowledge and skills organizations have to capitalize on that promise. 

That’s why we created our Explore Machine Learning course. We want to serve a similar role as we have in the mobile space: acting as the friendly guide helping individuals, teams, and organizations to unlock the potential of machine learning for their digital products and services. We felt that we were uniquely positioned to guide teams and organizations into this new world, having done so with the last major technology wave and because we continue to keep up with new and emerging technologies. 

Machine Learning – what you will learn 

We built the course with three key things in mind: 1) demistify machine learning by defining key terms and explaining how the pieces fit together 2) enable students to determine if machine learning is an appropriate tool for their problem space 3) empower students to understand how to integrate machine learning solutions into their current projects. We wanted to show teams the range of machine learning approaches: some can be implemented relatively easily, others not so much. We know that there are entire advanced degree programs on this topic, so our focus was not on replacing them. We wanted to give students an accessible entry point to the technology and as we always have, show them what’s possible, and give them the confidence to explore more. 

So whether you are a product owner or software engineer, a business leader or a designer, this course was designed to demistify the world of machine learning and help you understand what it really takes to implement a machine learning solution. Here’s what you’ll learn: 

• The basics of machine learning and begin to understand what’s important in the world of machine learning. You learn what the ‘magic’ of machine learning is so that you can converse fluently about it. 
• How to leverage existing machine learning solutions to solve your own product and development problems. Explore platform APIs, frameworks, and pre-built models to solve common machine learning problems. 
• About data collection and key factors to consider, and gain experience collecting and manually labeling data. 
• How to get started on a machine learning project. After seeing the fundamental building blocks and learning how to leverage existing systems, get a taste of what it’s like to build your own simple model. 

If these applications of ML pique your interest, we would love to help you, your team, or your organization level up on machine learning. Reach out to us if you are interested in attending a bootcamp or want to set up a course for your team. Happy coding! 

The post Why foray into machine learning? appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

eLearning, microlearning, in-context learning, self-paced learning, and social learning have all changed the way employees learn and train. And all of these have their place. Employees often find there aren’t enough hours in the day to finish their work—not to mention doing training on top of that. Studies have shown employees have as little as 2 – 3 hours per week that they can dedicate to learning something new. (I find that, for myself, it’s often less than that.)  

However, this doesn’t mean that the only types of training that can or should be delivered are those that can be ingested in bite-sized increments. And just because employees don’t have much time for learning during the work week doesn’t mean we can’t help them make time for it in general. 

Sometimes learning is hard. Sometimes it takes time. And sometimes it requires a more immersive approach. 

But… why? Why might you need to pursue a more immersive approach? Why can’t we simply provide employees with bite-sized, self-paced learning and expect great results every time?  

Consider How These Skills Will Be Applied

Skills like conflict management, writing, or organization can be immediately applied because employees often encounter these situations in their day-to-day work. Many skills like these are learned “on the job.” In other words, students can learn and grow their skills simply by applying them to their daily work. 

Other skills may be more about accessing information. If students use them infrequently and are unlikely to recall their learnings, they need reference documentation and resources that can be accessed on-demand. These types of skills might be appropriate for bite-sized and self-paced learning because the practice opportunities are ample. Employees can start applying what they’ve learned right away, and can do so in relatively low-risk ways. 

 Of course, this isn’t always the case. The biggest issue students run into is finding ways to practice their new skills in a real-world environment. Perhaps the student’s learning would slow down the rest of the team or the risk of real-world failure would be too high.

So, how can they find ways to practice? An immersive training environment provides students with these practice opportunities in a lower-risk, safe-to-fail environment. 

Another crucial element of practice is feedback. To truly learn and grow, students need to know whether they are on the right track—and if they aren’t, they need to know how to get back on track. This can be done through feedback loops. When learning a new skill, it’s important that students have tight feedback loops showing them how to get back on track as quickly as possible.  

On-demand learning has come a long way in terms of feedback loops, and there are great courses out there that provide helpful feedback. But sometimes, students need expert guidance to work through a tricky situation. That’s where immersive training comes in.  

What Is Immersive Training? 

We’ve been discussing immersive training, but what is it? Immersive training is one that forces students to really focus on their learning. Its most common form is that of classroom training. Classrooms, be they physical or virtual, are places where students are forced out of their everyday routine and into a learning environment. Students interact with each other, an instructor or facilitator, and new ideas and concepts. They have time and space to experiment, try, fail, and try again.

But immersive learning doesn’t only have to take place in a classroom. While we continue to believe strongly in the transformational power of classroom training (instructor-led or virtual instructor-led), we know that the learning world is evolving. Students, managers, leaders, and learning professionals are looking for ways to get the benefits of immersive, classroom learning while also making the experience more self-paced.

An example of this is blended learning. Blended learning gives students opportunities to learn on their own while also providing targeted opportunities for them to engage with an instructor, ask questions of their peers, or seek feedback on their work. It may not have all of the elements of a classroom, but a targeted, curated, and well-executed experience can still provide an immersive approach. 

 The Practice Conundrum 

Skill acquisition requires practice. We can’t fully absorb or learn something new unless we are given the opportunity to try it out (and try it out in a safe-to-fail environment).  

While there are practice opportunities that come with self-paced and bite-sized training, a significant load falls onto student. It’s on them to make the most of those practice opportunities. Since employees are already limited on time for learning, they might not commit as much as they need to the practice. Also, if they get stuck, there’s no one to help them through the problem.  

All in all, practice alone can lead to good outcomes if the student is able to find helpful resources quickly. If they struggle, it could also lead them to give up or take shortcuts to get through the activity rather than absorb the knowledge being provided. 

The Time Conundrum 

One conundrum surrounding immersive learning is time. Employee time is precious both to the company and to the employee. Prioritizing learning can be seen as a drag on productivity or taking away from business objectives. But self-paced, bite-sized learning can make the time problem worse. 

Take this example: I was recently speaking with a client about self-paced vs. live virtual training. The client indicated most of their students wanted to pursue a self-paced program, which was not entirely surprising. However, when we asked why they wanted to pursue self-paced, the client indicated it was because they didn’t feel they had time to step away from their daily work to do the training.  

Rather than simply taking the time away from work to learn the new thing, students would be trying to fit the learning in around their daily tasks. The interesting thing here is that pursuing a self-paced approach could actually make two problems worse.  

1. Students would be more distracted and stressed because they have to study in addition to their daily tasks, and  
2. They would likely learn less—or it would take them more time to learn the same amount—due to context switching and their divided attentions 

One way or another, learning is going to take time. Sometimes, the most efficient approach is stepping away from the daily grind for a while. 

The Knowledge Retention Conundrum 

The practice conundrum and the time conundrum both feed into the knowledge retention conundrum. If students don’t have enough opportunities to practice the new skill and they don’t have the time to focus on learning the new skill, then they aren’t likely to retain the knowledge and skills they are acquiring.  

For example, a programmer working in Java every day might have a hard time learning Kotlin using a bite-sized, on-demand approach. This is because she won’t have the chance to practice with her Kotlin knowledge; in between her training, she’s still working in Java 40+ hours a week.

A quick caveat: incremental learning stands in contrast to some of the examples we’ve been exploring. If you just need to learn how to enhance what you’re already doing, bite-sized, on-demand training might be just what you need. This could even be in the form of training materials you received from a more intensive experience.  

This works because:  

1. You aren’t context switching (or, at least not as much), and 
2. You’re learning something directly related to your work

This helps solve both the practice and the time conundrums. It resolves the practice conundrum because you can apply what you’re learning immediately. And it resolves the time conundrum because it’s more than likely helping you do your work more efficiently and effectively. As such, the time spent learning is being repaid with immediate efficiency and effectiveness. 

The Accountability Conundrum 

The element of accountability found within immersive training is difficult to replicate with bite-sized, self-paced training. It’s the social accountability of being in a classroom with other students and with an instructor, all of whom are working toward the same goal.

I went to a burger restaurant that my family and I once really enjoyed. They had replaced their cashiers with digital kiosks, so the only person working the “front of the house” was an expo who called out orders when they were complete. The experience was not the same. Half the kiosks didn’t work, there was no one to help if you had a problem with the kiosks, the condiments and napkins weren’t stocked, the lobby wasn’t as clean, and the food took longer to arrive. Even the quality of the food was worse. Why? There was no human accountability. 

Since no one had to directly interact with the customers, staff cared less about the customers’ ordering experience or whether the condiments were stocked. Without the human connection, the social desire to help and take care of others had been removed. 

I use this example to illustrate the power of social and human accountability in a learning environment. If you are working through content on your own with no human interaction, what do you do? You increase the lecture speed to 2x, you skim through the reading material, and you retake the quiz until you get the right answer.  

My point is simply that this type of learning may not encourage a student’s best effort, and it might not be intentional. It might be because students don’t have the time and the ability to really focus. It might be that they’ve got a looming deadline that’s taking precedence over all their other tasks. It might also be that there’s no accountability to an instructor or to peers.  

One of the reasons learning communities are so powerful is that community adds to the learning experience. Other students hold each other accountable. They learn together—from each other’s mistakes, their tricks and shortcuts, and form connections that can last years and even decades. 

What Does the Future of Immersive Training Hold?  

While I’ve been discussing some of the potential shortcomings of bite-sized and self-paced training, these training methods absolutely have their place and should be part of any robust employee development program. I’m not calling on us to abandon these and go back to ‘the good ol’ days’ of classroom instruction.

What I am suggesting is that every good and robust employee development program leave time and space for immersive training experiences. Classrooms and blended learning may take different forms, but they are still incredible places for learning. Transformation doesn’t happen without it, employees appreciate it, and it can accomplish things bite-sized training simply can’t.

Sometimes you need to learn from an expert, someone who has been there before and who can explain things in a way that’s easy to understand. You also need opportunities to socialize, build culture, share experiences, and practice things you wouldn’t normally do. 

The post Why Immersive Training Still Matters appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

In my previous projects, we used a waterfall approach where each phase was distinct and things unfolded more or less sequentially. Waterfall has certain advantages when it comes to training curriculum development because there are often harder dependencies between stages and pieces of content. In software, by contrast, you may be able to make a lot of progress on one item without having to interact with another work stream.

With training material, the bar for what constitutes a minimum viable product is often a bit higher. Training materials need to achieve a certain level of completeness and quality or they will simply not be useful to students. In training development, you may also need to complete certain activities before you start others. You can start writing a curriculum without first having a syllabus, objectives, or outline, but your chances of success are much lower and your chances of needing rework much higher.

Given this tension, it might be tempting to think that Agile principles can’t really be applied to training development. But while it may not be the perfect implementation of Agile, we found that many of the principles can be highly useful and also usable when it comes to training development projects. Here are 8 things we learned about what you need to do to develop training materials in an Agile way.

Define your course syllabus

Having a clear idea of what knowledge and skills need to be covered in a class is still incredibly important. So is knowing when those skills will be taught. Just because things are being done in a more Agile way doesn’t mean you can avoid planning. Once the scope and sequence have been agreed on, plan for how to deal with changes. As with software development, change can really disrupt progress. Figure out how much change can be tolerated without impacting your timeline or have a plan for how you will adjust your expectations and timeline accordingly.

Define your deliverables

Get really clear on what your deliverables are and what’s involved in each one. What types of deliverables do you need? What must be included in each for it to be accepted? Many courses need outlines, storyboards, student guides, and quizzes, but you need to define specifics for what’s needed in each of these components before you get started. Create deliverable prototypes or artifacts to refine what each deliverable should be, and describe what a deliverable needs to be considered complete.

Agree on a review process

Reviews can be a bottleneck and can kill your forward progress, so you need agreement in terms of what needs to be reviewed and how it needs to be reviewed. You also need buy-in that reviews will happen timely. When designing your review process, aim for the smallest number of reviews required to support the level of quality you want to achieve. At the same time, find ways to review materials in earlier stages when they can more easily be changed and take on new directions. Decide who needs to review at each step and make sure that they are empowered with the right level of authority to keep things moving forward. Decide how you will collaborate and what tools you’ll use. Lastly, don’t be afraid to adjust your review process as you go. You may find that fewer reviews will suffice or that what you thought was important has changed.

Start with your workflow and development process

This is a critical step in the whole endeavor. Here, you are taking the syllabus, deliverables, and review process, and aligning them into a coherent development process. Break down deliverables into interim stages so that there can be a continuous feedback loop along the way. Figure out how you will incorporate edits and updates into the process. Each round of review will generate some required updates, so you need to know how you’re going to deal with those in terms of tracking whether they were completed. We recommend building some trust into the process here. Don’t send for a second round of review to validate that updates were made until you get to the final deliverables. Remember, reviews can really stall the process, so you want to use them wisely.

Set up your sprint cadence and milestones

Plan milestones and don’t force yourself to align them with sprint deadlines. Use your estimates for how long deliverables will take to outline your sprints. Plan ahead but leave flexibility for your plan to change as you learn more about how long things actually take. Then use your velocity estimates and actuals to refine future sprint planning and adjust your milestones. It’s important to build in some flexibility here because you’ll probably find that things take a bit longer than you expected. 

Determine how you will track the work

I’d propose using JIRA (or something like it) with a Kanban-style setup. The setup might have more columns than you’re used to if you’re more accustomed to software development, but I found it was really useful for visualization and ownership purposes. Because instructional design projects usually involve a number of team and client team members, it’s helpful to have columns that can be assigned to an individual or group. This helps to drive accountability and can also help uncover blockers or areas where folks need support. Here’s an example of what that could look like in practice.

Another reason I like this setup is that it makes it easy to see where the work is in process and where the bottlenecks are.

Now cover your ears, purists. We used a combination of Kanban and Scrum approaches. We used Kanban for the workflow and actual board setup. This can help to visualize where work is in the process and can help to simplify it for the development team. But we found that scrum principles were still needed to set up a sprint cadence and understand velocity.

Focus on progress, collaboration, and feedback

Focus the team on doing their part efficiently and with the right level of quality. Encourage collaboration: peer reviews, reviews by other disciplines, and client (or stakeholder) reviews are all opportunities for collaboration and further refinement of objectives. Take advantage of those opportunities. Prepare your team for feedback. With all of the reviews, your team members are going to get a ton of feedback. In general, this is a good thing and leads to a higher quality product. But it can be overwhelming for team members who aren’t used to having others in their work to that extent.

Anticipate slower going in the early stages

As with any project, there is a learning curve. Be prepared for it. The velocity you achieve in the first few sprints may not be what you can achieve at full productivity. Moreover, the first rounds of production and review will likely take longer because the team is still feeling out the specifics of the requirements. It’s one thing to agree on something in principle, but it’s another to agree on the finished product. Leave some time and space for this norming to occur. It will save you time as you get further into development. You may even find that as these requirements become clearer, you can drop some of the review cycles.

We found that this was the case for our team. Even though we had gone through the exercise of clarifying expectations, the team still needed to calibrate to the right level of detail, what points to address, and how to balance all of the competing priorities. Once we got to this point, we were able to drop a couple of the reviews which helped to increase the team’s velocity.

Applying Agile principles to training development can have a lot of benefits. It enables a continuous feedback process and creates a more iterative environment where collaboration is encouraged and changes can be more easily facilitated. It enables team members to break their work down into meaningful and achievable chunks and helps you continuously refine estimates, due dates, and milestones.

The post Applying Agile Principles to Training Development appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

FAQs

Q: What is an open badge?

Open badges are web-enabled versions of a credential, certification or learning outcome which can be verified in real-time, online.

Q: How does my certification get displayed as a badge?

We have partnered with Credly to translate the learning outcomes you’ve demonstrated into a badge, issued and managed through the company’s digital badging platform. The technology Credly uses is based on the Open Badge Standards maintained by 1EdTech. This enables you to manage, share and verify your competencies digitally.

Q: What are the benefits of a badge?

Representing your skills as a badge gives you a way to share your abilities online in a way that is simple, trusted, and can be easily verified in real-time. Badges provide employers and peers concrete evidence of what you had to do to earn your credential and what you’re now capable of. Credly also offers labor market insights, based on your skills. You can search and apply for job opportunities right through Credly.

Q: How will I know if I’ve earned a badge?

You will receive an email notification from Credly (admin@credly.com) with instructions for claiming your badge and setting up your account.

Q: I need a certificate instead of a badge. How can I get a certificate?

Email training@bignerdranch.com with your request and we can send you a copy of a PDF certificate for your completed course.

Q: What if I don’t want my badge to be public?

You can easily configure your privacy settings in Credly. You’re in complete control of the information about yourself that is made public.

Q: Is there a fee to use Credly?

No. This is a service we provide to you, at no cost.

Q: Where and how can I share my badge through Credly?

You can share your badge directly from Credly to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; over email; embedded in a website, or in your email signature.

Q: Can I export badges issued through Credly to other badge-storing platforms?

Yes, you can download your badge from the Share Badge page. Your downloaded badge contains Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) compliant metadata embedded into the image. This allows you to store your badge on other OBI-compliant badge sites, such as the Badgr Backpack.  

Q: I have a question about Credly. Where can I find support?

You can find tutorials and answers to additional questions here: support.credly.com

Q: I have a question about my badge. Where can I find support?

You can email us any questions here: training@bignerdranch.com

The post About Your Credly Big Nerd Ranch Badge appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

We have seen unprecedented movement in the US job market in the past six months, as Americans have switched companies, jobs, and careers at high rates. For those of us who work in digital, it’s tempting to believe that we’re insulated from these macroeconomic forces. After all, the technology sector has continued growing even while other sectors have faced economic headwinds. On top of that, technology jobs often already come with flexible work environments, good pay, and solid benefits. But digital organizations have not been immune at all. 

As the pandemic drags on, companies continue to look to digital solutions to make it easier to reach customers and avoid the disruptions that the pandemic has caused. This has opened a floodgate of job opportunities for those working in technology. All of this has a compounding effect on digital organizations:

• There are vast numbers of open positions in engineering, product management, design, and strategy.
• Talent is leaving in record numbers.
• The number of available digital workers is limited.
• Salary expectations are skyrocketing.

Add all of this up, and you get a huge talent crunch. We are even experiencing this here at The Ranch. We have been fortunate to continue growing and expanding our capabilities, so we have a continued need to bring in exceptional talent. We have amazing Nerds and have been fortunate to keep many of them engaged and growing with us. But we have seen some in our ranks move on to other opportunities. While this positive attrition is healthy in general and somewhat expected in the industry, it continues to put pressure on recruiting and on the business.

Addressing the talent crunch

Given these extreme pressures on digital organizations, how can you address the talent shortage? Certainly, one way is through aggressive recruiting. While this will undoubtedly be a part of any strategy, if it’s your only strategy, it may come at a high cost:

• It puts massive pressure on your recruiters to bring in talent.
• It puts pressure on you to lower your hiring standards.
• It puts pressure on your bottom line because of increased salary demands in the market.
• It puts pressure on your existing teams to onboard and incorporate team members who are brand new to your organization.

Another option is reskilling. Let’s be clear; this option has drawbacks, too. For starters, moving existing employees within your company into new, open roles may require higher salaries. Additionally, talent may be comfortable where they are already. But investing in upskilling and reskilling can have huge advantages, too:

• It shows that you are committed to your people.
• It gives your talent a new path forward within your organization, which may encourage them to stay with you longer.
• It costs a lot less to retrain your existing team members than it does to go out and recruit new team members.
• It puts less pressure on your existing teams because they don’t have to onboard new team members to an entirely new organization. They can focus on onboarding them into their current systems and processes.
• It makes you feel good. Seeing talent grow and thrive within your organization becomes a point of pride and a part of company culture.

Now, what about upskilling? There will continue to be a skills gap until training, development, and recruiting catch up with the talent demand. This means that your digital organization will need to find ways to do more with less. This is where upskilling comes in. You already have great talent, so make it better.

Teach them something new, expose them to new ideas, and give them more tools to use to solve their current problems. Investing in your current talent shows your employees what’s possible and gives them the confidence to explore more and push further.

How can we help?

If this all sounds overwhelming, don’t worry. Big Nerd Ranch can help you with this problem. We have upskilled and reskilled thousands of software developers for more than 20 years. We’ve brought our world-class training to project managers, strategists, and designers as well.

Our Essentials classes are short, intense, and focused. They reskill developers and prepare them for a brand new role in mobile (iOS and Android) or modern web development (React). We even have something for developers who want to learn modern back-end technologies, such as Ruby, Node.js, and (hopefully soon) Go. We don’t claim that our courses are ‘easy,’ but they’re worth it.  After spending a week with us, your team will have the knowledge and skills to embark on new journeys. Will they be experts after just that week? No, we’re not miracle-workers. But they will be able to make impactful contributions to projects. 

We also offer our Advanced courses as a great way to upskill your teams. Our Advanced iOS and Android courses help to build a strong foundation for teams and can help junior developers contribute more consistently and meaningfully.

It doesn’t stop there. We can also serve beyond the classroom by embedding our experts in your team to increase velocity while providing support and mentoring. Our Embedded Experts provide collaboration with a side of consultancy to help you produce the best work possible.

Recruiting will always be crucial for growing teams, but reskilling and upskilling can help fill the current talent gap. By giving team members new opportunities, providing onramps for junior talent, and improving the skills of existing team members, organizations can rethink their strategy for filling new roles.

The post How will you address the talent shortage in your digital organization? (Hint: recruiting alone won’t get you there.) appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

The pandemic forced us to reconsider what it meant for Big Nerd Ranch to be a training company and how we could best serve our students. As it became clear that it was not safe for us to teach students in person, we evolved our model to include live online training. 

Though we have learned a lot about training online and have made improvements to deliver great online training experiences, we know that in-person training has its own set of advantages, and some students prefer this method of learning. After all, up until March of 2020, every class we ran (with one or two exceptions) was in person.

Since then, we’ve missed the ability to walk around a classroom and check on our students. We’ve missed the conversations about programming, pet projects, families, and life; the evening labs where we dig deeper into programming topics and help students get their personal app projects off the ground; and the deep, personal connections that occur when you share an intense experience in the company of others. That’s why we are eyeing a return to the physical classroom later this year, set to begin in May of 2022. 

What are the COVID requirements? 

Taking great care of our students has always been our priority, and this is no different. In this case, that means taking the right precautions to ensure the safety of our students and instructors. Based on the most recent guidelines put out by the CDC, the best way to keep everyone safe is through vaccination requirements.  

We are requiring all of our instructors who teach in person to be fully vaccinated, and we’re requiring the same from our students. This means all students who attend our classes must show proof of vaccination. Those with a legitimate exemption from vaccination will need to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 PCR test upon arrival at the training class. Depending on the severity of the situation, we may also require masks to be worn while indoors.

In addition, we ask all who are planning to join a class to acknowledge that they have not had COVID-19 symptoms within the last couple of weeks and that they have not (to their knowledge) been exposed during that time. If you have traveled by air in the last few months, you have probably seen a similar type of survey from your airline carrier. 

Our lodging and catering partners also have strict cleaning and dining protocols in place to support a safe and healthy experience. They have taken great care of us and our students in the past, and we are confident that they will continue to do so when we return to the classroom.

What happens if COVID restrictions change? 

While returning to some form of in-person learning is our hope, we are optimists, not fortune-tellers. Circumstances surrounding the pandemic are fluid and in-person training might not be possible. We will continue to provide updates as in-person courses approach.

We are thrilled to be able to offer our signature Big Nerd Ranch experience again, as thousands of students have learned a new technology or leveled up their skills with us in person. Live online classes will continue to be offered as well, as this is a preferred option or the option some feel most comfortable with right now. We are excited to have you learn with us in whatever format fits you best. Sign up for a Bootcamp and learn more about them on our website here.

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Training acts as the bridge between the old world and the new, showing team members what’s possible in the new environment and giving them the confidence to explore more.

Let’s look at some transformation challenges and how we’ve seen teams use training to face them:

Standing up an entirely new team.

Sometimes organizations are looking to go places they have never been before, so they need to create a new team to get them there. For some, this might involve standing up a team to build an entirely new native mobile app. For others, it might be upgrading their web development capabilities to embrace a more modern framework. We have provided training and mentoring on mobile and web essentials to make sure that team members have the right skills to meet the demands of their new environment. One of our clients, for example, was able to have mobile developers starting to work on platform-native code just weeks after coming out of our training.

Needing to increase a team’s impact without increasing its size

The economic climate of the past year has meant that a lot of teams have needed to do more with less. Some companies have laid off vendors and brought development work back in-house. Or they have seen their digital product roadmaps increase exponentially but have not been able to recruit large numbers of additional staff to meet the new demand. Even more, some companies have needed to look for creative ways to provide opportunities to an existing employee who feels stagnant in their role. Whether it’s training that gives staff an entirely new skill set or training designed to enhance their professional development, training investments have shown themselves to be great ways to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of development teams.

Needing to build more resilience

Sometimes teams need more flexibility. They need engineers who can address multiple elements of the technology stack from back-end web to front-end web and even native mobile applications.  Having the necessary training to develop relevant skills can take your company to new heights. Cross-training has proven to be a way for these teams to increase their capacity to address feature requests by having more engineers who can contribute. It also helps engineers stay engaged by opening up more opportunities for them in terms of training and work variety. 

One of our clients noticed that their feature teams had become too dependent upon the mobile team. If they wanted a new feature, they had to wait for capacity to open up on the mobile team to make any progress. So they trained members of their feature teams on mobile. Now, instead of waiting for mobile team availability, the feature teams can create their own mobile features and reach out to the mobile team for validation. This has allowed the mobile teams to focus on the critical components of app architecture while allowing the feature teams to make more progress, quicker. 

Building digital products more collaboratively, with greater efficiency and quality

The increased demand for digital solutions has driven a strong need for companies to rethink how they do digital work. Companies have started to look at moving from a project-based mindset to a product-based mindset. They have rethought their organizational structures to build feature teams, product teams, scrum teams, or capability teams. The common thread across these new organizational structures is that team members need new knowledge and skills to work in these new ways.

Some teams have even seen that while their team members have some formal training on things like Agile, design-thinking, and product ownership, they have a hard time knowing how to implement that knowledge on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, many team members are not used to the high degree of collaboration and interdependency that working in such an environment requires. These team members are seeing that they need to better understand what their collaborators are doing so that they can more effectively work together.

At this point, you may be thinking “ok, I can see how training can address team challenges. But how will I know it’s working? What will my team gain?” 

These are fair questions, which we will address… right now.

Your team can do things it couldn’t do before.

A client of ours shared this story, they were in a meeting showing off a new mobile feature, and another product team said, “Hey, we didn’t know you had a mobile team.” The truth was that they didn’t have a dedicated mobile team, but they invested in training for their existing team, which enabled them to take on that new work.

Another client shared that after a training focused on product management best practices, they found those trained employees consistently referring back to the definitions they learned during training, giving them a common language from which to work on new challenges while promoting reduced supervision.

Your team offers more creative solutions to problems.

The combination of prior experience plus new skills is a powerful one. Team members who gain new skills bring their old experiences to new environments and see things in new ways.

Persistent problems or challenges start to get better.

For team members to adopt best practices, they have to learn them. Reinforcement is also very important, but if the team is doing something incorrectly or inefficiently because it doesn’t know any better, no amount of accountability will move the needle. Training provides a strong foundation—allowing teams to improve and hold each other accountable.

Your team works more effectively together.

A learning community can be a powerful thing that has benefits that go beyond the training course. The fact that the team now has a shared experience to draw from creates social capital that eases the friction among team members and gives them a common starting point.

Another way to think about it is what would the employee experience be like if you don’t pursue a training program. There are many highly talented engineers, designers, and product developers out there, and many of them can figure things out and learn as they go. But this often results in a lot of stopping and starting, frustration and burnout. Giving the same talented team members a solid foundation can help them to get there quicker and do so with less friction, saving you time and improving morale.

Where should I start?

Like many things in business and life, it’s best to start with your needs and goals. What are you trying to accomplish?

• Are you looking to develop new capabilities? What will the new capabilities achieve for your team? 
• Are you looking to more effectively and efficiently onboard new team members? What will these new team members need to be successful?
• Do you need to modernize your practices? Are you modernizing your technology stack? What new skills will team members need to get there?
• Do you need to drive consistency and best practices? Is there a need to upskill and or reskill your team?

You also want to identify who should be involved and who needs training. Is it the whole team? Is it new team members? Is it future team members? Is it a cross-functional group?

Next, it’s helpful to think about what knowledge and skills team members will need to operate in their new world successfully.

• Is it learning a new technology stack, framework, or language? Is it learning new ways to design and build products? Is it more soft skills in terms of collaboration, leadership, and teamwork?

Lastly, you want to figure out what kind of training you need. The training should meet at the intersection of business goals, training needs, and target audience(s). It should give students the knowledge and skills they need to thrive. Or it should enable team members to work more effectively together or across teams.

Looking for a way to transform your team? We’ve got you covered.

At Big Nerd Ranch, we believe that training can drive transformation not just because it’s what we do but because we have seen its effectiveness time and time again. Seeing individuals and teams gain skills and confidence that they did not have before is one of the most rewarding and special things about the training we bring. Let’s figure out how we can bring that kind of transformation to your team. Ready to get started? Get in touch and let’s chat!

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As it turns out, global pandemics are unpredictable. Who knew? And while vaccines and other precautions have helped to bring back some elements of life as we knew it, the pandemic has continued to make it difficult to bring back all of the elements of ‘normal’ life. 

Unfortunately, in-person training is no exception. We started the summer thinking that we would be able to resume in-person learning sometime in late 2021. But the rise of the Delta variant has caused us to re-evaluate our plans. Because caseloads and uncertainty have remained high, it seems that most folks are not comfortable traveling a long distance to spend a long period of time in an enclosed space with others outside of their normal circle.

So, we are going to keep all of our bootcamps online through the end of 2021. We plan to return to the physical classroom in 2022.

When we do return to the classroom, we want to create a safe and comfortable environment. Because we place a high value on the safety of our students and instructors, we are going to require students who attend our classes to show proof of vaccination. Those with a legitimate exemption from vaccination will need to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 PCR test upon arrival at the training class. Depending on the severity of the situation, we may also require masks to be worn while indoors.

If you are looking forward to joining us in person, check out our course schedule for upcoming dates. And check out our blog for more information on how we will approach the return to the classroom.

Stay safe and we wish you happy coding.

The post We’re Keeping the Ranch Online… For Now appeared first on Big Nerd Ranch.

In order to have a high-functioning engineering team, you ideally have a mix of experience levels with your intermediate and senior talent shepherding the more beginning talent in your organization. Many companies have pursued internal reskilling and upskilling programs to help meet the changing talent demands of engineering organizations. Engineers making this transition may be seasoned professionals, but they lack experience in the new technical domain. All of this places more demands upon the existing team and especially the intermediate to senior developers.

Purposeful Growth is Vital

Teams that expand too rapidly and without a mentorship or other plan for how they are going to mentor and grow their beginning developers, often start to experience problems like:

Burnout by project leads and top performers: having only a few intermediate to senior programmers means that the ones you do have are going to be overextended, overburdened, and unhappy.

Reduced velocity on projects (the inability to complete the same amount of work in the same amount of time): as senior engineers are taxed with helping others, they can’t contribute as much to the codebase. As their velocity decreases, so does the overall velocity of the team.

Reliance on outside vendors for business-critical features and functions: outside vendors can be excellent partners (and we’d like to think that we are one of them) but even with great vendor partners, companies usually want to maintain technical ownership over core business functions. 

Inability to execute more ambiguous projects with higher degrees of uncertainty: ambiguous and ambitious projects require seasoned hands who know how to deal with the uncertainties and risks of a particular development environment. If those seasoned hands are spending a majority of their time grooming others, they may not be able to give these difficult problems the proper attention.

Beginners are given more responsibility too quickly and without a proper mentor-mentee relationship and experience: if beginners are asked to do too much and lack the right support, it creates more churn in terms of higher demands on QA, rework, and more peer review.

Reduced career opportunity for beginners: even the most ambitious and self-motivated beginner needs some guidance and support to reach the next level. If the support and a clear career path  for professional development aren’t there, those high performers will seek out teams and environments where they do exist.

Mentoring Programs Can Help You Avoid Those Problems

Mentoring programs are a good place to start. For our purposes, a mentoring program refers to a formal understanding and defined relationship where a more experienced or seasoned programmer works with a more beginning team member to build their skill. These programs demystify the career development process by clarifying roles and responsibilities. They give beginners role models with the proper leadership skills necessary to develop and strengthen critical skills for their new role. Having a formal mentorship program provides them with a clear path for how they should be developing. They also uncover, validate, and value the often ‘hidden’ work that mentors do. 

The mentoring relationship can take many forms in relation to professional development. Examples might include: managers mentoring direct reports, peers mentoring peers, teams mentoring other teams, or consultants mentoring team members. In any case, the important thing about the mentoring program is that it’s strategic, scalable, flexible, and meets the needs of your team. Here are seven things to keep in mind as you start building out your mentoring program.

How to Get Started

Figure out what problem you are trying to solve 

It may be that you simply need developers or a team that can build features, reduce technical debt, and draw down your backlog. If this is the case, your best solution may be to bring in an embedded team member in more of a staff augmentation capacity. If you want to look at this as an opportunity to build your team for the future or if your company wants to do its own feature development, then it’s probably time to invest in an upskilling, reskilling, or mentoring program.

Find out what’s important 

Interview team leads and team members from across disciplines. Are the team leads spending too much time reviewing code and not enough time shaping the direction of the project? Are team members having difficulty following best practices consistently? Is the code being deployed too buggy? Are designs not being implemented faithfully? Taking a moment view your day-to-day operations from a different perspective can help identify where the team is having issues which in turn can increase the likelihood that the mentoring program will be effective. 

Use this information to determine a clear focus for the program. The goals do not all need to be quantifiable, but they should be measurable, visible, and important to the team. Maybe the focus is on increasing the team’s velocity. Maybe it’s making sure the team writes good tests and writes testable code. Maybe it’s about increasing the consistency of the team’s coding practices.

Structure a plan 

Define what specific activities the mentor (or mentor team) will do to help grow the skillset of the team so you can ensure you have the right mentor for the job. Consider activities that will be scalable, repeatable, and consistent. While there may be some more formal training needed, the purpose of the mentoring program is to drive change through consistent follow-up and follow-through with the team members.

Get to work

Implement the agreed-on mentoring activities consistently and predictably. Make sure team members know what’s expected of them during the mentoring activities and make sure the mentor consistently follows up and works with team members to drive best practices.

It’s worth noting that coding excellence and technical acumen do not automatically make you a good mentor. While many senior developers are great mentors, it’s important to recognize that mentoring is a unique and specific skillset. Look for team members or partners who have a passion for developing others and who also understand how to bring them along.

Take care of the culture

While most beginning developers crave mentoring relationships, it can be difficult to invite a stranger into your problems and to feel comfortable sharing challenges. So, it’s important to build a culture where curiosity, transparency, and authenticity are encouraged. This makes it easier for the team to feel comfortable with the trusted advisor and for the mentor to drive value.

Measure progress

Return to the goals you defined in the discovery period. Is the team making progress toward the goal? Has the mentoring program had the desired impact?

Learn and adjust as you go

It’s important to continue evolving the program to meet the team’s needs and retain employee engagement. For example, maybe the team progresses more quickly than anticipated with regard to one of the initially defined metrics. Adjust course—like taking an Android or iOS bootcamp, and find a new focus to continue driving forward.

The Ranch is Here to Help

If this all seems too daunting to take on, then don’t worry. Our Corporate Training service can help put your employees in a great position to not only advance their own professional growth but help bring up others around them. Get in touch and let’s chat about the best fit for your company. 

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