Since October 2020 we’ve been working with ClearkSky Logic to grow their team and so far they’ve hired two of our graduates, and are looking to hire from CodeClan in the future to strengthen their expanding team.
We caught up with Darren Auld, CEO, about what they do and why they’re growing their team of CodeClan graduates.
Tell us a bit about ClearSky Logic
What we do is digital transformation, simply delivered, what that means to us is that we love solving business problems. Whether that be in the property or energy sectors or almost any sector we can help. So when we’re looking for the best talent to bring into the team, we’re looking for people who are natural problem solvers and have experience of communication with customers and situations outside of coding, people who have that sort of experience have an edge over typical developers that we tend to find.
Fantastic! What’s the training and onboarding process like for CodeClan graduates?
The onboarding process is similar to bringing on a junior developer from university. What we try to do at ClearSky Logic is almost do away with the old school line manager way of working. Our success has been through bringing in junior team members, coaching and mentoring them to get them to mid-tier and beyond as fast as possible and we’ve found the best way to do that is through a buddy system.
When a junior starts at ClearSky, they’re assigned a buddy who is a senior developer in their stream of development, so if you come in as a junior front-end developer you’ll be buddied with a senior front-end developer. Senior front-end developers might have multiple buddies but it’s their job to understand what goals each one is working towards for their personal development as well as technical development and talk about the obstacles that are stopping them from getting there and sharing advice and knowledge on how to make the next step.
We find that this system is really useful, even if that senior developer isn’t part of the project the junior is working on, they’ve always got someone they can bounce ideas off and say, I’m in this situation, I need to build X that I’ve never built before, how would you go about it. This means that they don’t spend three days a week staring at their screen, trying different things and coming up against roadblocks because they don’t have anyone that they can rely on. Earlier in my career, I found myself in situations like that now and again, and we try not to have this at all at ClearSky Logic.
What kind of projects are CodeClan graduates working on right now?
A project we’re working on at the moment is My Booking Hub, which is a booking platform for mobile-based services, if you want to have your joiner come round to give you a quote on your new kitchen, at the moment you’ve got to leave a message on their website asking them to come round say on Saturday and there may be a lot of back and forth working out a suitable date and time. The platform is an advanced algorithm that allows users to book in a time. The tech lead for this project is a CodeClan student from cohort 7, who had been out in the tech world for a few years in different companies before joining ClearSky Logic last year. He has the ability to span the gap of architect and really strong developer but he’s also great with people communication – he’s one of the brightest prospects we have got in the company. He works on the project with two juniors, who both studied at CodeClan over the last year and a half, it’s great to see that this one project team is made up from people that have been at CodeClan – it’s a fantastic endorsement for the job that you’re doing.
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