Onboarding and Mentoring Apprentices with DevOps Culture

Abstract:

Our work, industry, and culture can benefit from bringing fresh eyes into engineering. I’ve personally heard from many industry veterans that they want to mentor new engineers in their workplace, and desperately need new talent, but don’t know where to start initiating a program or convincing an organization that junior engineers will add value to a team. I’ve been very fortunate to have some fantastic mentorship in the beginning of my career, and have been paying it forward by mentoring and advising new engineers. My mentor Gary Foster and I gave a version of this talk last year at DevOpsDays Silicon Valley, and I thought it would be valuable to do a follow up conversation about results of our mentoring process one year in. In addition, I’ve also collected data from an onboarding and mentorship survey to gather information about what has and hasn’t worked for onboarding new engineers.

In this talk, I’ll cover the following: * What to look for when hiring an Apprentice * Skills new engineers bring to the table * DevOps culture and methodologies provide an excellent framework for onboarding and mentoring * Top fears of new engineers, and how to help mitigate them * Setting expectations for Apprentices and Mentors * Mentor, Apprentice, and Company responsibilities * The Apprentice => Journeyman => Master progression * Making space in your team for Apprentices * How to interview a Junior Engineer * The importance of knowledge sharing and growing the community * Resources to get started mentoring, even if you can’t do so right away with your company

Speaker:

Mercedes Coyle is a Data Infrastructure Engineer with ulive.com, recent apprentice, and mentor to budding engineers.