Being The Trainer

Being the Trainer

Last week, for the first time, along with another colleague Alice, I ran an internal 2 day training course titled ‘Skills for the Agile Developer’. Funny how in an industry full of men, it was the two female developers who jumped at the chance to present the course.

Anyway, without wasting time worrying about that, we had 9 attendees show up varying from graduate intake through to Associate Director technical leads.

The course covered TDD, continuous integration (using Jenkins, Maven and Git), pairing, code smells, legacy code, automation and unit testing. There were lots of hands on exercises to reinforce the principles. Having spent many weeks updating power point slides and searching for fun images to make the slides more ‘interesting’ , my concern was that the course would be too easy for people…however I do tend to forget that not everyone is working in an Agile environment, and I seem to be unable to compute that some teams still only do manual testing.

As luck would have it, all the participants said they learnt something and loved the format. They especially liked the exercises as they re-enforced the principles we were teaching. I also kept throwing in anecdotes around my experience of working in an agile team and witnessing the agile transformation, which went from chaos to calm, as developers re-skilled to learn TDD, automation etc. Participants liked this, I think it reassured them that these practises can be applied within an Investment Bank, we were essentially the success story.

Being the ‘trainer’ was an experience I really enjoyed. It was utterly exhausting but the participants were really open to participating, sharing ideas and stories and providing feedback, which by the way, was really good ;-)

“Excellent refresher after time away from Agile practices”

-“Great course – good to hear real world examples”

“Very good course, very good content, very good presentations”
“Really good – all developers should be on it as baseline for modern coding.”