Six months ago, our team grew stronger as we welcomed our junior devs Petar and Dejan. Today we are happy to call these guys, not only colleagues but also our friends. That’s why we are so excited to say that these two have successfully passed the six-month junior developers onboarding program!
To learn more about this whole process, its milestones, and most of all what we had in store for Dejan and Petar at its finale, keep on reading.
Why Is Developers’ Onboarding Important?
As recent stats from Sapling, one of the leading global HR platforms suggest, a strong onboarding program improves new hire retention rates by 82%. Moreover, it boosts productivity by 70%. With this in mind, we worked hard on providing our newcomers with the right set of tools and support to show them why Net2 is the perfect choice for them.
With carefully selected best practices in place, onboarding developers has proven to be an amazing journey.
Today they can tackle complex tasks, which in some companies only senior developers dare to ‘play’ with. But let’s see how the process started before we’ve reached this stage.
How Does Successful Onboarding Look Like?
Onboarding is not only building up skills and expertise but also making people feel welcome, and getting them acclimated with the organization and their colleagues. It goes from introducing them to the different team workflows to showing them where we can have coffee breaks nearby (and so we did 🙂 ). Introduction to Billy the Cat was a must, of course.
Once the basic introductions were done in the first week, onboarding of our new developers entered its second phase – explaining business behavior behind solutions and technical skills training. During this whole process, we’ve tried to get their feedback on the program itself to see how they felt about it. Both Dejan and Petar agreed that the most important thing about it was the nurturing approach to learning, without any pressure despite the training and courses they needed to pass to complete it.
Dejan said: ‘In my opinion, the friendly and healthy atmosphere we’ve experienced at the very start and throughout these six months, was a main driving force for our progress, motivating us to learn and improve our skills’. Petar agrees, stating: ‘Without pressure, we were eager to learn faster. Another plus for me was for sure the eagerness of the rest of the team to accept us so fast and help us when we needed’.
No developers’ onboarding is completed until they’ve had .NET, C# unit, and product architecture training. Hence, these first six weeks helped them obtain the specific knowledge required to work on our products. This includes different tools we use on a daily basis such as Postman, Visual Studio, SQL databases, all Azure storages, MongoDB, C# Driver, and SQL Server Management Studio.
As a result, after only six weeks, they both were able to handle simple implementations with very little guidance. Equally, they were already able to implement new tasks for standard use cases.
At this point, the initial developers’ onboarding phase has been completed,, but they kept on working on different online pieces of training, required for passing the onboarding process after a six months period. As a result, they’ve finished Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, Software Development Fundamentals, and Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals exams. These exams serve to prove that guys have successfully mastered the cloud concepts, different Azure practices, handling data in the cloud, working with C#, Microsoft Visual Basic .NET.
In the End, There Was Cake
Now we stand at the finale of their six-month rollercoaster ride, and it feels like they have always been with us. During these last months, they have proven to be invaluable assets to our team, rolling up their sleeves, and working on complex tasks already.
Hence, our managing partner Luc Debliquis had an important announcement for them:
‘We are now celebrating the end of your onboarding, not only because these six months have passed, but because you went successfully through all training, certifications, and evaluations, and last but not least, the team adopted you unanimously. Bravo!
I am amazed that we could already delegate you so many real project tasks, that you delivered above expectations.
Big thanks to the rest of the team for having taken care of the babies. It was time and energy-consuming, but very worth it !!
To mark the occasion, we’ve had a little surprise in store to celebrate the end of the junior developers’ onboarding program. Since no celebration at our office goes without sweets, this one was no different. So we have snuck in a cake to show our appreciation and tell them how grateful we are because they have chosen us to grow together.
