Elevate Your Tech Talent with the MakeDev Program

Today’s business leaders and HR managers face seismic shifts in the business landscape, whether pandemic-related or precipitated by competitive innovation.

To respond, organizations often have to reduce staff and skills in one area of the business while ramping up staff and skills in another. Although software can be leveraged to mitigate some of these impacts, it’s also one of the primary driving factors creating the economic changes organizations are dealing with.

Software is driving the innovation that creates winners and losers. Uber Eats, electric vehicles, contactless order submission and pick up—these are just some of the recent trends driven by software.

An elegant solution: the MakeDev program

Cprime’s MakeDev program is a strategic and innovative upskilling program that addresses these pain points by allowing organizations to reliably and consistently supply the demand for tech talent while absorbing the employees in other areas of the business at risk of attrition.

The program solves for the global tech talent shortage and shifting internal workforce needs while supporting an organization’s competitive advantage. The six-month MakeDev program trains non-technical individuals as junior-level full-stack developers using technical agile principles.

Using Cprime’s online curriculum, Technical Coaches pair with the students to understand their individual learning styles and teach learners how to leverage their unique skills to accomplish individual and team tasks.

During the last two months of the program, students begin integrating with their long-term organizational teams while still receiving coaching and mentoring. This ensures learners are able to effectively apply their newfound skills in the work environment.

Let’s dive deeper into how the program:

• Infuses your technology initiatives with thinking from other areas of your business
• Increases employee retention and loyalty
• Creates better products and services
• Increases organizational morale
• and Creates technical talent focused on delivering high-quality software with a lower total cost of ownership

The ideal MakeDev candidate

Cprime works with organizations to help them tailor their learner selection process.

Rather than rely on traditional criteria for assessing program candidates, MakeDev champions whole person qualities we believe are fundamental to the long-term success of developers. These include inclusive skills such as curiosity, grit, and the ability to think in abstract and logical terms.

Curiosity is important because there is so much to learn. An underlying need to understand why and to explore helps learners sustain the long journey of understanding how the software works and how all the concepts work together.

Grit is defined as “courage and resolve; strength of character.” It takes courage as an adult to start down a new path where you have no knowledge or experience, and to ask questions. It risks being thought of as ignorant or slow, which is exactly how many learners feel as they start the journey. Resolve helps them to push through when things get tough. We continually work with learners to help them through this phase, but they’ll need resolve to keep working at it when they just aren’t getting it.

Abstract and logical thinking skills allow learners to understand and work with the underlying concepts of software engineering. We encourage learners to develop their math skills as they are extremely valuable in programming and some basic math skills are needed.

Reduced need for layoffs

This program is an alternative to reducing an organization’s headcount which is often one of the first steps organizations use to reduce costs. However, layoffs are often short-term fixes to long-term problems.

Direct layoff costs can run as high as 50 percent of employee compensation in lost productivity, not to mention the loss of knowledge, learned skills, contacts, and customer relationships. In addition to the monetary impacts, there’s also a demotivating impact on workforce morale when staff is laid off. This negative perception impacts an organization’s internal culture and portrays the organization in a negative light externally.

Enhanced recruiting

Recruiting and hiring a replacement can cost as much as 30 percent of the position’s salary. MakeDev supports the recruiting process by widening the pool of potential candidates that can meaningfully contribute to an organization’s software engineering team. Instead of competing for expensive, external talent that can take up to six months to onboard, recruiters can now widen their focus to include non-technical talent, whether already available internally or from outside the organization.

By upskilling at-risk talent or bringing in external talent with the promise of upskilling, organizations create a positive perception of the organization both externally and internally. This retains and leverages the investments they’ve already made in their people and prepares them and the organization for the future.Companies can be seen as innovative and forward-thinking while simultaneously reducing turnover and recruiting costs. They are able to use talent more closely aligned with the corporate culture and leverage known employees who can infuse new life into the technology teams.

One of the surprising benefits of the program is actionable diversity benefits built into the program. The MakeDev program removes some of the traditional barriers to creating diverse teams. By focusing on curiosity, grit and abstract logical thinking skills, organizations can cast a wider net and leverage diverse thoughts and perspectives to deliver products that are increasingly requested by demographically diverse markets. Organizations can now act on social equity in meaningful ways that yield greater outcomes.

Greater employee retention and loyalty

A PWC report found that 52 percent of surveyed millennials prioritized working for organizations that provide for career advancement. Another 35 percent indicated a preference for organizations that provided training and development programs. To date, Cprime’s MakeDev program has graduated 94 percent of its participants. Two years after program completion, 94 percent of our graduates are still working in technology-related positions within their organizations.

In our experience, the program increases morale throughout the entire organization. Even those not directly associated with the program are inspired by the sponsoring company’s investments in employees’ futures.

In an era where companies are consistently cutting costs, it’s rare to find programs that save money and improve long-term organizational outcomes for both employers and employees.

Improved quality and innovation

While other programs teach individuals the mechanics of programming, MakeDev focuses on creating strategic thinkers that can leverage unique perspectives and learning styles to create technically superior software that is safe, easy to change and well positioned to adapt in the future.

We believe giving learners a solid software engineering future is grounded in a solid agile education that includes technical craftsmanship and team collaboration. We also believe this foundation includes critical thinking and problem solving skills that evaluate how code written today expands or constricts software capability in the future.

Explore how Cprime experts can help you elevate your tech talent.

Ken Robinson, Technical Coach