Building a successful training academy: the teamwork pillar
Kainos is a growing company, and that growth continues to accelerate. This year more than 100 people will be joining Kainos and will take part in one of our training academies.
Growth of this rate can bring with it some challenges, but as the lead of our Engineering Academy, it’s a great problem to have.
Welcome back to this series of blogs on building a successful training academy. If you missed the previous posts, I discussed the importance of identifying the foundational technical skills that make up a role, building content, identifying a suitable mentor and continuing to develop technical skills after an academy ends.
In this post I want to focus on how to apply technical skills as part of a team. It’s very rare that a role will not involve working with others to achieve a shared objective, so you should schedule your training academy with this in mind. Being able to work well and efficiently with others is a skill and comes with practice and experience.
Your first goal should be to identify how the talent will work as part of a team after the training academy. You can then provide opportunities throughout your academy to simulate working as part of those teams in a safe environment where the talent can learn by making mistakes to better understand how to handle situations on real projects.
As part of each technical skill that you teach you should have at least one team exercise. This can come in the form of a challenge or a set of tasks that can only be accomplished if the talent work together to achieve the goals.
Naturally an element of team competition will creep in if you give the same task to different teams, this competition can be healthy but can also lead to bad habits such as skipping initial planning and taking regular breaks. It’s important to remind the teams that they will not be competing against each other on real projects and should avoid bad habits so they don’t quickly burn out or make poor decisions.
One bad habit I have seen many times when training talent who have recently come out of the education system is unhealthy individual competition.
This is when one or more individuals on the team will make decisions with the goal of making themselves look good at the detriment of the team. I'm not saying that all individual competition is bad but it’s important that this doesn’t impact on the performance of the team. This is a habit that you will want to address during the training academy to ensure that when the talent join teams they won’t exhibit this behaviour.
Making mistakes is a great way of learning. You can therefore build activities and tasks for a team that contain pitfalls that the teams might easily fall into. The learnings from identifying these pitfalls and being aware of them on projects is invaluable experience that can only be achieved when the teams feel like they are in a safe environment.
To ease the transition from training academy to projects I find it best to finish the training academy with a project simulation. Ideally for this simulation you will use a real project with an objective for the teams to work towards but it’s also possible to create a sample project that reflects the work that the talent will be doing on real projects.
It’s important that the project simulation has some challenging aspects that forces the teams to work together and be creative to solve. Think of what the most difficult aspect of the role they will be performing is and ensure that they have a chance to face this in a safe environment. This will allow the talent to learn and work closely with the mentor to better understand their role.