Everything Is Learnable
It’s been a month since the commencement of this year’s edition of the Genesys Internship Program — Codename: Learnable and the experience has been nothing but thrilling. I’m in love with the fact that I get to meet a set of very vibrant,smart and interesting young Nigerians just like myself every year — one of them even knows how to play the guitar!.
The Genesys Internship program is a six month paid internship program for undergraduates and fresh graduates who aspire to become very skilled software developers or product designers. The purpose behind this is to take them from entry level to a professional level by getting them involved in actual software development projects. By this we hope to increase the number of truly skilled persons in the vast talent pool that is our population.
It is my first time planning and coordinating this internship program and it has been a very wonderful learning experience for me. Very few things feel better than starting out as a software developer and suddenly finding yourself in a place where you can develop other developers. I have always been a firm believer in the role of proper development of human capacity towards creating an Africa that looks like the very popular Wakanda in Marvel’s recently released Black Panther. Contrary to the schools of thought that see Africa as rich in only natural resources, I believe that Africa’s true wealth lies in the brilliant people of Africa and I am proud to be part of an initiative that will maximize and showcase this previously ignored wealth.
According to best selling author Ray Dalio in his book titled Principles, an organisation is a machine that consists of two very important parts; The people and the culture. Each influences the other, because the people who make up an organisation determine the kind of culture it has, and the culture of the organisation determines the kind of people who fit in. If you get the people and the culture right, all will be right with the universe. Getting any of them wrong will be catastrophic. To this end, we formulated a recruitment strategy that will ensure that we get perfect fits for our internship program. This was the first step in our plan. Our strategy was designed to target young people who are either in the university or graduated recently that are passionate about developing a career in tech. Our recruitment process consisted of three phases; Online applications to ensure that the opportunity is open to as many people as possible, a phone interview to further get a feel of how well applicants would fit into the program and a physical interview for the shortlisted applicants. The physical interview consisted of a panel session with members of the Genesys team, a personality test, a psychometric test and a technical sprint. We understand that it takes people who are willing to learn to actually learn hence, the rigorous recruitment process.
After ensuring that we‘d get the right people, the next thing was to design a curriculum that will work and ensure that the right learning outcomes are achieved. The program has three learning paths; Front End web development, Back End web development and Product design. Each learning path had its curriculum designed to be immersive and task based as against the typical classroom system. What we have is a learning method that focuses on critical thinking and problem solving rather than memorizing a lot of theory. Our people basically learn by trying to tackle problems and figuring out the solutions to those problems. It is also worthy to note that collaboration is one thing the we encourage a whole lot in our system and this was also reflected in the way the program was designed. In the second phase of the program, the interns are split into 5-man cells consisting of product designers, front end and back end developers where they’ll get to collaborate on building actual software solutions & products.
According to world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. After a month, I can’t say that we’ve gotten everything right but I can say that it has been a huge success. There’s still some work to be done. As we know, every system must undergo constant review and redesign to stay relevant and as we progress we’ll make adjustments until we achieve the refined version of what we have begun.
If anyone had told me that I’ll be able to design a program like this one, I would have given them the eye. Yet here I stand at the crossroads of destiny, a software developer and an internship program designer-general — lol.
It took months of reading, talking to experts, brainstorming and other forms of research to design this internship program and I can say that the learning experience for me has been amazing. This little fit has strengthened my belief in our mantra — Everything Is Learnable.
