Go against the flow: This is how your organization can benefit from training young engineers

The talent pursuit and the shortage of tech talent is the topic of the day in every startup in Israel. The lack of manpower has become an existential anxiety among companies, especially since their growth is dependent on hiring great employees. When a skilled workforce is a costly resource that is in short supply, the future development of the product is at risk.

The obvious way for organizations to deal with the shortage of manpower is to direct more and more resources to employer branding, advertising, marketing and encouraging employees to bring their friends to work for the company. These methods are effective but up to a certain limit. While the road to recruiting experienced people was paved, the integration of high-potential candidates was sometimes neglected.

The essential elements of a successful company must be a professional, skilled, and an experienced development, operation, and management team that has the highest qualified capabilities. However, many organizations have chosen to give up on hiring interns and the production of training tracks for three main reasons: time, high resources, and the fear that these interns will leave to work for other companies afterward.

At Siraj Technologies we have developed a challenging training program for outstanding students from the Bedouin society, who are completing computer science or engineering studies. The development of our training program comes from a real need to create a bridge for students from the academy to the labor market, a move that every student in Israel finds challenging. Despite the high-tech sector suffering from a severe employee shortage, the difficulty of undergraduates in finding a job is only getting worse.

How to develop an effective training program?

One of the main problems of many training programs is that they provide too much administrative work for interns and too little professional and thorough training that includes dealing with problem-solving.

True, developers will not always be able to solve problems that experienced people are challenged by, but they will develop their own way of thinking, which will help with both their own professional development, and the organization’s.

Organizations that provide interns with training processes that offer the opportunity to deal with ongoing tasks of the development team, will enjoy a different way of thinking that will challenge the existing team members, inspire them, and help them in solving problems. Both parties will benefit from this move: The intern who will get to know the organization, gain experience in-field tasks, a sense of belonging and their own value will be intensified, and the company which will attract more employees with their highly effective training process.

Existing Employees Development

When the focus of organizations is on the product and customers, retaining existing employees through pay, options, and benefits, the personal and professional development of employees becomes neglected.

Wages and rewards are very important, but without gaining skills, employees will not be able to thrive within the organization and will not be able to advance professionally or on the managerial ladder. There are several ways to help employees in their personal development and it is not always necessary to expend high resources. Rather, it can be done by combining the development of the employees with the goals of the organization. For example, personal branding through encouraging employees to build professional articles on the company’s website, organizing webinar events that host experts from other organizations who can offer knowledge and insights to the employees, initiating collaborations, and more.

Even experienced and talented employees who come to the organizations need guidance, adjustments, and training. Every employee who arrives needs training and a process of acclimatization.

For any organization, there is no substitute for experienced employees, on whom the knowledge and value center for customers is based. But in an age of significant human resource shortages, alongside very frequent technological changes, organizations cannot give up on the opportunity in employee training.

Bottom line: employee training is a long-distance run

Employee training is a long-distance run. An intern who has not come with experience in the field will have to go a very long way to reach what others have learned over the years. A good organization will be able to run a training track that will allow the intern to learn things on their own in a shorter period. But that requires a lot of commitment and motivation to learn on the part of the intern. When working with the right skills, education and motivation, the chances that the interns will reach their highest potential is great.

Employees who have been given an opportunity by the organization and have entered a training track also know how to reward the company, whether it is by giving more of themselves to the workplace, staying overtime hours, showing more commitment, and staying in the same workplace for a longer period than the average employee.

This is how you will make the training more effective

From the experience we have gained over the last four years, we believe that the right way to train interns is by giving them experience in a real project that is not a top priority. You may be surprised by the skills and performance of the employees, who will also be able to learn from mistakes and get better. Put the theory into practice.

Continuous feedback - It is very important to provide feedback and constructive criticism to an employee who specializes throughout. Criticism must be constructive and instructive; the goal is to build a candidate who also knows how to accept criticism and get better. On the other hand, when there are successes, it is important to empower the employee to build self-confidence.

Diversity of mentors - every engineer in the organization has abilities and virtues that others do not have. Let the employees learn from as many people as possible so that they will gain diverse abilities and skills.

Use government support – these days the Ministry of Economy and the Innovation Authority are running programs that help absorb interns, who receive state support. The government subsidizes a part of the intern’s salary, which lowers the intern’s cost.

The author is Co-CEO at Siraj Technologies, which develops AI and machine learning technologies for the rapid adoption of IoT technologies