Latest batch of trainees join product teams
We are excited to announce that our latest set of student recruits, have passed out from our internal training program, and have joined product teams. The six students who joined the training program in May 2022 passed out in August 2022. Churn360 and Document360 teams absorbed three students each as junior web developers.
These students— John Edelbert Rex, Gowtham Sundarapandian, Deebikaa Ravishankar, Methran Gunasekaran, Pownraj Sivaraj and Sridhar Padmanaben last week presented their final projects which included the development of a “Glint”- a job portal and Space360- an effective reservation system. They created these products with all the knowledge they had gained over their three-month intensive training program including .Net, Angular, azure asp.net core etc. Additionally, this batch had to produce one blog for each of the above projects and every student had to have answered at least six questions in the stack overflow platform.
Some of the students who were initially nervous about getting into the training program say they are now confident about learning and adapting any new software or technology and can’t wait to start working on real-world tasks. “When I joined the program, I used to know only programming and data structure algorithms. I knew nothing of web development,” says Methran Gunasekaran. However, he says he has now become a full stack developer, with thorough knowledge of working on the front and back end. “Our instructor Syed Haroon allowed us to learn at our own pace and taught us self-learning, which was extremely motivating,” he adds.
Need for Intensive Training
Talent Acquisition Manager, Rohith Unny, who goes to colleges for campus recruitment, says most computer engineer, science or applications graduates come in with only a basic or overall knowledge of coding or programming languages like java, c++, HTML etc. “But our three-month intensive training program makes the students’ product ready. Students are trained to start working on bug fixes and can even develop a small feature for a product,” he says.
The internal training program began in April 2020, during the pandemic, and has had five batches graduating so far. Conducted by our technical coordinator, Syed Haroon, the first two batches were conducted online due to the pandemic and the remaining three batches were conducted in person. “Close to 70 people have graduated from our training so far, all of them currently employed,” says Haroon. “Initially during the pandemic, we had 800 candidates all toppers from various colleges, whom we filtered through an initial assessment and picked the best 100. They were then screened to 50 and then after a final round of interviews, we picked 20 people for the first batch of training,” he recalls.
Making Training more exclusive and focused
Now batches are restricted to five to six candidates so we can provide more individual attention. “We only recruit people who are extremely strong or uniquely talented in an area like logical reasoning. However, students are not specialized or focused on any technology. They usually have a glimpse of .net, PHP, java, flutter, C++ or coding among others. We need to teach them the technology required to solve a problem statement and web development,” says Syed.
Training also involves adapting to the corporate work culture which includes inculcating the attitude to self-learn, reporting to meetings, recording every bug and error, attending group discussions etc. “Since they are just freshers coming from different backgrounds, we sometimes need to help them adapt to the work culture,” says Syed.
Curriculum
The curriculum for the three-month program which includes 5-6 modules are taught over 10 days each, is formulated in consultation with the product engineers. “This includes coding standards, latest tools, and frameworks for UI (user interface) design, best practices in web development among others,” says Syed.
Head of Operations, Arunkumar Kumaresan, does a weekly review with the candidates, along with judging the mini projects they do every month and at the end of the training program. “We teach them fundamentals of programming, web computing, front end application development, full stack web development, and latest tools, making them ready to work on products instantly,” he says.
Thanvandh Prabhu, a junior software engineer with Churn360, who graduated from the training program last year says he joined Kovai.co, with only knowledge of Flutter. “During the training, I learned Angular and .Net and by myself with just nudges and guidance from Syed. We gained a lot of knowledge by self-learning and learn to practically use and test that knowledge during our project at the end of the program”.
Business Impact of Internship Program
Arunkumar says that the company has been trying out many types of training, internship, and on-the-job training programs since 2014. “In on-the-job training programs, it took us a year to get the trainees’ product ready, set aside the return on investments, in terms of money, time among others, on the candidates. Comparatively, after we began introducing this intensive internal training program, our time to get them product ready, dropped to just three months,” he adds.
