The Jnaapti Journey – Helping Companies Succeed

Jnaapti has conducted training in over 30 companies in over 30 technologies in the last 6 years. We are the proud technology training partners to some of the best minds in the industry. Our training programs have been attended by employees of organizations like VMware, Akamai, Citrix, Ericsson, Practo, SAP Labs etc. We have trained people in organizations of varied sizes (startups, SMBs, MNCs) and with varied experience levels – freshers to people with over 20 years experience in the industry.

Our youngest student is 6 years old and our oldest student is a retired doctor who was building his own startup. Professionals that we have trained play various roles in organizations; we have trained software developers, architects, test engineers, system administrators, database administrators, Devops engineers, performance engineers, full-stack developers, sales people and engineering managers.

Our vision is to be able to teach anything to anyone starting from anywhere. With this in mind, we have evolved a carefully thought through training process which caters to organizations of different sizes and varied training needs.

jnaapti’s 4 step approach to training

Learning Objectives

When companies plan for a training, they have various objectives in mind. Sometimes, the training is planned to meet organizational learning goals, sometimes for project specific needs, sometimes for anticipated project needs or sometimes for employee motivation. The way a training is delivered depends on these objectives.

The experience level of the target audience differs. People may be learning the same technology, but they have very diverse backgrounds. The way you teach a learner fresh out of college is different from an architect who has 10 years of experience in the industry. To a fresher, you need to relate more to the concepts that they have learnt in their curriculum and why these technologies exist and what to expect from each. To an experienced person, you need to be able to relate to the technologies they already know and what they are learning now. The way you teach MongoDB to a DBA who has worked in Relational Database technology all his career is very different from a fresher who will perhaps find MongoDB more natural than a relational database!

Clients have several constraints in which the training is expected to be delivered. Sometimes the participants need to take time off from their projects and sometimes the participants could span across different geographies.

Also, a recent trend that we have observed is that, clients want a single training program to cover multiple technologies. For example, a training on AngularJS requires us to cover advanced JavaScript concepts, NodeJS, Webpack, HTML5/CSS3 and AngularJS of course. Also, technologies evolve at a rapid pace, so the technologies used in products today may be outdated in a year or two. We need to design a training in such a way that we talk about the intricate connections between these various technologies, the underlying concepts, their application to solve real-life problems, the evolution of technology and the future of these technologies.

Waypoints

Once the organization has determined what they want, it is now time to focus on the participants’ individual skill sets. The organization may want all its participants to reach a specific target, but they are all starting at very different starting points. You can compare this to a Google Map navigation where different individuals are trying to reach the same target but they are starting at very different locations.

For example, two people may be learning Android development, but one may know iPhone development, and another may be a Web Application developer. The destination is the same, but the learning paths will vary a lot.

In this step of the training process, we learn more about each individual, their skill sets and come up with a custom learning plan on an individual basis. This is the shortest path to their learning goals set by the organization.

Learning Process

We then use a combination of theory and practice sessions to bridge the identified skill gap. A good technical training program should focus on concepts behind the technology, the technology itself and the application of the technologies in real-life problem solving. We specialize in ensuring that this balance is maintained. Learners are given activities to solve and Jnaapti’s expert coaches work closely with learners to help them bridge their skill gap. We teach learners best practices on how to learn. We specifically focus on self learning, since in this world where technologies evolve rapidly, we believe this is an important skill that learners must have for continued learning. The upskilling progress is determined based on an ongoing assessment. Learners work on activities which have been derived from real-life scenarios and their submissions are reviewed by our expert coaches. Coaches also give inputs on how solutions can be improved and help learners whenever needed.

Review

Have we achieved what we set out to achieve? We try to evaluate that in the review process.

Reviews are done on a daily, weekly and milestone basis.

When we conduct a fresher training program, we gather a lot of insights into every individual. The organization may have invested a few hours interviewing a potential hire, but seldom does this insight into the individual get communicated to the organization. A training organization like jnaapti would have invested 10x more hours in each individual and the insights we have about every individual is valuable to the organization and we take great care to communicate the same to the stake holders. We gather deep objective and subjective metrics about every individual and help organizations determine the best projects that the participants can be deployed into. We call this as “Jnaapti’s Deployability Metric”. Sometimes organizations miss out to discover gems in their own organization. We ensure that skills of individuals doesn’t go unnoticed.

Sometimes the learning program may only cover a part of the technical skill set that the organization expects in each individual and they may want to know who among its employees is best fit for a specific project need. Jnaapti provides this information in the form of a “Learnability Metric”, which, in simple terms, is the speed with which a learner could reach the target (skills required to work on a specific project).

Further, with lateral training, we help the Learning and Development team (L&D) understand how effective the training is, by providing real-time insights into the progress of the program and helping surface possible deterrents to the overall success of the training program.