Eat your own dogshit. A term that I learned years ago when visiting Microsoft HQ in Redmond.
During the last years at CrescentOne I was invited to support the development of an Academy. With a background in didactics, building courses, running workshops and training sessions I do know what it takes to develop a course. How to effectively teach complex topics and how to measure progress and result.
As always, it takes time to develop that first cours(es) with enough content and a 'this is a good course' feeling. Can it improve? Sure and it will. In my brain, structures start to develop right after that moment. What is the next 'layer'? What is the next logical topic that will add a lot of value to students? This process never stops.
In a earlier post we informed about the tracks in development at the moment. And we do add content every day.
A second main track is called onboarding. Onboarding in an organisation is a poorly managed process in most organisations I know. If you're lucky you are asked to read the ISO handbook, or maybe follow some silly 'how to create a safe password' courses.
Don't get me wrong, organisations need to agree on how to govern these procedures. But really...
In my opinion recruitment doesn't stop after signing the contract. The time to get a new hire up and running has an impact on the department, the organisation as a whole and the return on the investment.
It is perfectly possible to present a set of effective courses, real challenges, that prepares new hires, currious collegues or interns to move from 'noobs' to well skilled starters.
Every instruction on technology is a candidate to add to this onboarding tracks. And that is exactly what I do. Most or those courses do have substantial content, are medium to hard. A lot of the content is curated - existing YouTube instructions, whitepapers or other discussions. The content challenges the students to think, form an opinion, try by them selves.
In these courses, measuring the progress, is not the first concern. But how would it be when we took onboarding by eating our own dog shit, more serious?
I believe that presenting these courses to the mix, will shorten the onboarding, lower impact on the organisation and improve the confidence of new hires. I believe that collegues working for years for the organisation, will be taken over by those new hires, if they do not spend time on those topics. I believe the cost of recruiting will be lower, because we know what we expect from the candidates.
I believe we should add this opportunity to our development programs to develop the organisation.