Welcome back to the new and improved product updates from Firehose, proudly headquartered in San Francisco, California. Our uniquely diverse team has remote teammates across three time zones in Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey. With much excitement, our team shares the latest journey to design a new training platform.
In this post, we will first review the company’s projects from June to October. Since the visual updates to our platform at the beginning of summer, plenty of work is happening behind the scenes. We are advancing our training programs and strengthening our professional community. With this in mind, our three key objectives addressed feedback, career resources, and the barrier to entry.
Responding to Feedback
Much like how our dedicated support team provides personalized feedback for all trainees in our free intro program, we also take the feedback from our community very seriously.
A core training principle we follow at Firehose is to value the importance of feedback. This gives our company clearer direction on how to improve the experience for you.
Organize a thorough orientation into the training programs.
81% of new trainees are seeking more guidance at the start of our intro program. We hear that there is plenty of excitement to start coding, and we’re streamlining our onboarding process to help trainees feel welcomed, excited, and prepared to forward their careers.
Provide extended community support for all trainees.
First, we’ve heard that office hours are an invaluable opportunity for trainees to connect with each other face to face, and we’ve been improving the weekly event’s agenda and topics for the duration of the hour.
Second, the Slack workspace is also undergoing improvements. As our community has grown, so have the variety of discussions. We have included a new code of conduct and new channels focused on specific topics.
Lastly, we are keeping up with demand for technical support in our programs. By optimizing the process, we are helping our technicians to efficiently answer questions when needed. In return, this will help our trainees to effectively find guidance and apply their learnings into practice.
Sharing Career Resources
We are feeling the community’s need for dependable technical training to supplement an academic degree. From online certificates, nanodegrees, and job guarantees, researching which program best fits your needs is an often overwhelming task.
As a result, we have made the conscious decision to make our career resources more accessible. This helps our community to reinforce their knowledge base, and for the industry to employ a more qualified workforce.
Deliver relevant content in info sessions.
We believe there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all program. For this reason our info sessions are honest, free of jargon, and full of useful information about the profession. At Firehose, it is especially relevant that we focus on developing the technical skills of our trainees. Our goal with info sessions is to help you navigate the space. By doing so, you can confidently decide on a program that best fits your career needs.
Design a comprehensive blog for sharing helpful content.
Since 2014, we have written over 300 original articles and guides to help people transition into a software developer career. Our blog’s design hadn’t addressed how we can search through hundreds of posts to find career advice. An outdated design buries valuable content.
Therefore, our new blog design is the next step in sharing this wealth of information to people who need it most. We have organized our posts into four main categories: Industry, Career, Education, and News about Firehose and our community.
Lowering the Barrier to Entry
We have been listening, and we hear the uncertainty from new trainees about what they’re capable of. We believe proper industry training can answer questions like, “If I have to fix my code twice before getting the thumbs up on my challenge solution, does that mean I’m a bad programmer?” or “What if I solve all of the challenges right the first time – does that mean I’m good enough to become a developer?”.
Because of the uncertainty, we’ve taken responsible steps to help trainees reach their career goals. Much like the ability to read and write, we can all acquire the ability to code.
Display smarter training metrics for pursuing goals.
We want to provide trainees courses on the fundamentals of programming as well as give useful feedback on their progress in the intro program. And by giving better context about what trainees have covered and metrics that are constructive, we are increasing completion rates for beginners.
Additionally, the team project is a fundamental course in our full program, and we are actively improving how we qualify trainees and provide better guidance through the exercise. By providing personalization and smarter metrics, we are consistently helping trainees of all backgrounds reach their career goals on their schedule.
Bring training content up to date.
Probably the most important task has been to update our program’s content to meet our new training standards for excellence. Our expert community makes this possible. Course-wide edits for accuracy, readability, and comprehension happen daily to make our program have the best technical training experience in the industry.
These necessary improvements make it obvious; the depth of information in our programs and the impressive size of our community calls for a more sophisticated platform.
Designing a New Training Platform
Our vision is to make online education personal and smart, and our new platform is the next big step towards it.
Because every trainee comes to Firehose with a truly unique career goal, we believe it is our responsibility to personally support each individual. Most noteworthy, the architecture of this new platform may be our biggest undertaking to date.
Deliver the right content at the right time.
Above all, each trainee deserves a training program personalized to their special needs. Our new training platform is modular. This means the structure of our programs will allow for better course customization. Other platforms offer slight changes to their programs. Rather, we are deliberate about our training strategy, and this architecture gives us the flexibility to practice effective methods and exercises.
Additionally, the platform uses the React JS framework. Since the language is also modular, it will allow for faster feature development and a more dependable platform for future training programs.
Provide top-notch training programs.
Hours of new industry relevant courses are coming. We are purposefully improving how we develop programs and how we prepare trainees as critical thinkers. This mission includes an encouraging and original step-by-step user experience. As a result, the platform will host a catalog of valuable, in-depth technical training for the modern world.
Check back often and sign up for our newsletter to get sneak peeks of our new training platform and exclusive access to new courses. Experienced developers who want to learn React should join the waitlist for our new React course. And expect more regular product updates from the team in the coming weeks!
