Transcript

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0 [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you for joining me for this talk about creating Dev-ternships as a way to grow your ServiceNow team. Finding the right talent for your team is always a challenge, no matter the industry. Now, I am Sharon Barnes. And nowadays, I am a developer MVP with two years of ServiceNow experience, as well as over 12 years of training and management experience. Now, my previous career, I was a training manager and branch manager for Eastern North Carolina ALM insurance company. And I transferred from that non-technical career to ServiceNow, because I felt overworked and underpaid. I'd had a friend working on the Now platform, who had talked about how much he enjoyed it for years. But I always assumed that it was out of reach for me, that the career was just for people with specialized skills or technological genius. Well, that friend asked me to help review his k-19 workshop for wording and screenshots. And I ended up completing and understanding the workshops content. I had just built a virtual agent with no degree or intensive training. I realized that this was learnable. And within one year of study, I was employed with a partner, New Access Innovations. And New Access allowed me to leverage my skills as a trainer and as a ServiceNow developer to found a Dev-ternships. Now, we're going to go over several points today. First, why we built a Dev-ternships. Second, what we built for version 1 and the structure around that program. And third, the future improvements that New Access will use for its next iteration. Now, why we built it. Well, I've participated in hiring for technology, insurance, and retail industries. And I see some of the same trends across all of them. First, great talent is rare and expensive. I'm sure you know of multiple openings that have been unfilled for months. Second, cultural fit is essential. Now, most businesses continue to scour resumes or search LinkedIn for the person with the most experience and certifications. Hiring firms and researchers are beginning to realize that in many industries, the most qualified candidates can actually damage a firm when they don't jive with the company's culture. And third, what people claim as their skills does not always equal reality. With a good interview process, you can help prevent this, but a few can slip through. Now with a Dev-ternship, you can train entry level admins and developers with precisely the skills you need them to have, as well as make sure that they are a fit for your company culture and the team that they will be working with. Now, beyond these programs, New Access identified one more issue they wanted to solve, a lack of diversity in ServiceNow candidates. According to Nelson Frank's career and hiring guide, individuals of Black, African, and Caribbean descent represent only 3% of available developers. Studies have shown that diverse organizations have better outcomes than their less diverse peers. And the industry of information technology is limited in that regard. Therefore, it's in our own best interest as leaders of our organizations to encourage and empower minorities and women to enter into our industry and grow the diversity of the ServiceNow ecosystem, so that we can achieve those better outcomes. Now, what we built. We created a network to recruit from historically Black colleges and universities. Second, we created a repeatable system to train interns on specific skills. And the system is flexible enough to allow substitution of different curriculum, forum, different departmental internships. And third, we created survey metrics for continual improvement of the program. Now, the first step to a great internship is recruiting. Getting quality people into your program. And recruiting takes more time than you think, because the go-getters apply early. So three months out to get approval from your schools, get the job posting up, distribute flyers to the students via that university's regular communication system, and schedule info sessions. About two months out, hold those information sessions. These should be led by somebody passionate about the program. And at the same time, start collecting resumes. Around six weeks out, you're going to want to run the interviews with your selected candidates. And by four weeks out, inform the interns that they've been selected for the program. And that at the start of the semester, they're also going to be starting working with you. Now, the overall structure for our internship was broken down into three phases. The first was eight weeks focused on learning the fundamentals of ServiceNow development. Then, we had one week of exam prep to help them earn their CSA. And the last three weeks were for building their capstone project, an application based on their interests. Now, we covered 10 topics. And our goal was really for them to gain more than their CSA. We wanted to ensure they had the experience to become effective admins. So we included a variety of topics, including ITIL practices, gathering requirements, participating in sprint planning, and just overall, understanding the development skills needed for the bigger picture of how ServiceNow allows people to work better. Now, our course was set up with a weekly tempo. We created a scoped application on the Now app platform, incorporating knowledge articles of the weekly curriculum. And the interns had a primary instructor throughout the entire program for a main point of contact, as well as having weekly lectures for members of our team to act as subject matter experts for each of the topics. We added gamification to the midweek review session to increase engagement. And just overall, we wanted to ensure that there were interactive elements, so that it was more than just instruction to go study remotely, but a constant feedback and engagement throughout every week. Now, we got our content from a variety of sources. And this is the most common question I get asked. We combined hands-on exercises from the developer site, as well as Now Learning with readings, videos, and lectures, as well as making sure that the students had that one on one mentorship to guide their learning. Overall, it worked. But you can constantly improve from experience. And I want to call out several points where we found for improvement, so that you can avoid them when you build your own programs. First, target schools with a solid science and technology programs. We noticed that the number and quality of applicants from these schools with that focus was better. Second, we wanted to make sure there was more practical experience. Make it feel a little bit less like a class with fewer theoretical exercises and more time on the real work needed by businesses. Third was business value added. Having the capstone driven by actual business needs. By having it driven by their interest, well, we ended up with a 100% sports related projects, which are fun but not exactly applicable to our customers. Now, looking at how this changed the format of our internship from the three phases into four phases, with the first three weeks focused on CSA prep. Consolidating that foundational information down to a shorter period of time. Six weeks of shadowing their mentor, being able to complete some of that same work and stories that their mentor is doing. The next two weeks are all about that capstone program tailored to that business scenario. And then, the last week is for the certification. And we placed this at the end, because we had noticed that some of the interns were demotivated by the difficulty of earning that certificate in the middle of the program. Now, these changes mean that for our first three weeks, we had to really consolidate the information down. So rather than it being a weekly schedule, we've switched to three times a week going through that lecture cycle of labs and quizzes. Now, overall, I want to thank each of you for your time today. Because with Dev-ternships, you were training entry level admins and developers in precisely the skills you need them to have, as well as making sure that they are fit for your company culture and the team that they'll be working with. And while they're gaining these skills through the paid internship with the company, your company is benefiting from the opportunity to grow their ServiceNow practice. Thank you for your time. And I hope that this information will help you in creating your own Dev-ternships programs. If you're interested in a little more information later, feel free to contact me, Sharon Barnes at SN Devs. And I look forward to hearing about the success of your programs. [MUSIC PLAYING]