Hi, my name is Julian. I'm German but I live in London. I've been there for two years now

working at a company that makes software in Perl and my job is training new Perl developers.

I've talked about this in the past and now I'm going to talk a bit more about how we

actually go about not the training itself but measuring progress within the training.

So the talk is called Progressing from Humans to Developers which is about a progression

framework and I'm going to explain what that means once it actually works skipping slides.

Let's see if this works. It doesn't. That's a shame. Live demo never works. It's a bit

rubbish. Why doesn't this work? It hates me. It's CJIP and Brokid I think. There we go.

So this should... There we go. Splendid. So about my company, Oleo, it's in South London

and it makes recruitment software which is kind of like the same thing as when you apply

for a job at Deutsche Bahn for example. You have to go through lots of different steps

to apply and we make similar software. We've been doing that for almost 20 years in Perl

and we're currently on the third iteration of our product which is about 12 years old

in Catalyst and DBX class so fairly modern Perl. We have a very senior development team

or at least we used to since I've been brought in. We've tried to make it a bit more junior

by getting more people so obviously it's hard to just hire more senior developers because

there aren't that many senior Perl developers and most senior developers don't really want

to learn Perl nowadays so they brought me in to get fresh talent in and that seems to

be working quite well. So I'm saying it's a senior team because that's quite relevant

to the motivation behind this thing I'm going to talk about specifically. So since I've

joined two years ago we've hired four trainee developers and they're making significant

contributions and it's working out really well. I'm going to share how we're doing

this. But first remember your first tech job and think about how insecure you actually

were while you were doing your first job. I mean this wasn't easy. I know for me it

wasn't easy. There were lots of things that went through my head repeatedly and while

I was confident and I was quite eager to prove myself I didn't really know how. I didn't

really know what do I have to do to be good? How do I know I'm actually doing a good job

no one told me? And I think that's the same for most of us. So some of this is connected

to imposter syndrome which is very real but there are other things as well and we're going

to explore kind of like reasons behind this question today. So typically when you have

new trainees, so I'm using the word trainee here because I'm in the UK, if I was doing

this in German I would say Auszubildende. There's a bit of a difference. Typical questions

they would have is kind of like what is expected of me? What do they want from me? How do I

know if I'm good at my job? How am I doing in general? Am I doing this right? And also

how do I improve? What do I need to do to get better? How long is this training program

if there is one or the Ausbildung? Well in Germany obviously the Ausbildung was three

years long but in the UK the thing we're doing isn't an official training. It's just we hire

people and give them the title of trainee developer which is not quite a junior developer but

if you're straight out of uni you're just not a junior developer yet. You might not

even be a developer yet. Some of them might think something like when do things start

to get harder because I'm actually not very challenged right now. Or they might think

okay I think I've learned all of this, what incentive do I have to actually stay here?

Why shouldn't I accept this job offer that's like 10 grand more in the city? So we kind

of need to give them answers. Nick is asking a question. What? Oh 10,000, 10,000 thank

you. Yeah 10 grand is 10,000. Yeah so they have all of these questions but they're usually

not going to ask them because you know asking questions is bad right? That shows weakness

so I'm not going to ask these questions. Well we have to answer them for them. But there's

more. There are also these challenges so obviously hand in hand with the questions that the beginning

of your career is scary. You start this new place, you're in this, it's the business world

suddenly you don't know how to behave and no one's telling you what you're actually