| My previous employer did this pretty well. They had a paid internship program, but they also had started as an AS/400 shop writing RPG code, which none of the local colleges taught anymore. So, they basically developed their own course, and kept it fairly consistent over several years. The first 20 or so hours was some computer based learning modules they had purchased to teach fundamentals and syntax. After that was a series of well documented training assignments. For the first assignment, they'd be handed an existing report program with several bugs that they'd have to figure out. After that, they would start on a simple CRUD program that they would expand on. At the end was a capstone assignment that simulated a real project from interviewing a "stakeholder" to gathering requirements, writing documentation, and implementing the solution before finally promoting it through the change control process. Altogether it was 150-200 hours of training, which corresponded to about 2-3 months for a student working part time. The company recorded everyone's performance, so after the first dozen went through the program, they had a solid baseline for comparison to tell if someone was falling behind or blasting ahead. If a trainee proved they were solid, they might get to skip the last assignment. If they were horrible, it would quickly become apparent and after a few chances to turn things around, they'd be let go. I ended up on the team responsible for running the training program. Even as the development started shifting to Java, they still used the RPG training for a long time, since it was at least a gauge of a person's ability to pickup unfamiliar tech. Part of my job was to help develop a Java version of the course to eventually become the new default. Reviewing the assignments was kind of fun and taught me to appreciate people in QA roles. Submissions didn't have to be perfect, but they had to meet a certain level of quality before the trainee could proceed. Sometimes someone would bomb one of the early assignments, and that was okay, even if fixing the issues and resubmitting took longer than normal to finish. The real red flag was repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Even though the training program was created for interns, a few of the dev managers would have all their new hires, including senior engineers, go through the same program. Normally the full time hires would "graduate" early, but I know of at least one mid-level dev who didn't make the cut at all. The hiring manager was thankful to have dodged a bullet, and have the historical performance data to back up his decision when he went to talk to HR. |