6 Ways to Level Up Your Software Team’s Coding Skills

Software developers are a critical resource. Whether building internal systems or developing products, their coding acumen brings incredible value to every endeavor. 

Staying competitive in the marketplace requires continued investment in your team’s professional development. Learning how to improve coding skills is critical to continued success for your team.

This guide will explore ways to enrich your team’s programming education by helping you determine your training benchmarks.  

Where to Start With Building Your Team’s Coding Skills

Before you enroll your employees in a webinar, plan a coding bootcamp, or sign them up for a course, you should consider two key questions that will shape your continuing education program. 

What Are Your Department’s Weak Points?

There’s always room for improvement, especially in the ever-changing world of coding. But, it’s important to determine specific skills you want your team to hone to implement impactful training strategies.

You can determine your team’s weak points in a variety of ways:

What Does Your Company Need?

After determining which skills your team may need to hone, consider how training improvements will fill the gaps in your operations. After all, professional development for programmers should meet two key criteria:

           1. Building skills that will help your business stay competitive and operate efficiently

           2. Improving individual team members’ skills 

Keep in mind that you don’t have to tackle every need at once. After you brainstorm a list of your needs (with input from multiple departments and stakeholders), make a prioritized list. From there, you can implement training strategies to conquer your most pressing goals first. 

Your coding team is unique, and so is your business. Determining the needs of both before you start training will help focus your efforts and improve your training ROI.

6 Tips for Improving the Coding Skills of Your Team

Once you’ve determined your needs, it’s time to start leveling up your team’s coding skills. Let’s explore six potential training methods you could use to expand programming knowledge. 

#1 Courses

Organized courses are an excellent choice for individuals and businesses looking to improve employee skills in specific subject areas. Classes come in all shapes and sizes, and companies can invest in structured training in a variety of areas, like:

Programming courses use a structured curriculum to teach the material, and they vary in length. Some courses also culminate in a certification exam or a proficiency test that employers can use to test the efficacy of the course administered. 

#2 Free Resources

Free coding resources are abundantly available, and business owners can use this to their advantage. To help coding team members take advantage of free resources, managers can take a few different approaches:

   #3 GitHub

GitHub is an open-source platform that coders can use to code a web page collaboratively. The program is akin to Google Docs and other collaborative editing programs, and programming team leaders can introduce it to:

Collaborative work can help employees new to coding build confidence and get comfortable with asking questions of more experienced teammates. Even if your brand doesn’t formally implement GitHub-based trainings, you can encourage your programming team to use it during the drafting stage or to experiment with newly-acquired skills. 

#4 Bootcamps

Programming bootcamps are intensive training sessions that typically last multiple days. Some bootcamp programs aim to produce a final product by the end of the training to test mastery and increase their training ROI. 

Like courses, bootcamps come in all shapes and sizes, and they can be tailored to match a variety of skill levels. Consider running a bootcamp to:

#5 Coding Games

Education gamification can yield incredible results for expanding your team’s skills in a fun way.

Coding games are an excellent resource for training because they provide differentiated instruction — teaching that accounts for students’ differing skill sets, meeting them where they are. Coding games accomplish this in two ways:

While you might perceive coding games as a resource for children, adult coding games and games that introduce higher-level skills are also abundant on the market.

#6 Shared Knowledge

Before investing in a training program, consider the value of your current knowledge pool among your coding staff. Perhaps a member of your team has a valuable skill to share with the rest of the department but simply hasn’t been given an opportunity to educate. 

If someone shows interest in training the group, remember to:        

Level Up with New Horizons Coding Courses

Learning how to improve coding skills is part and parcel of running an effective programming department. The tips above will help you develop a training strategy that will both build your employees’ skill sets and benefit your brand as a whole. 

New Horizons is making it easier than ever to build skilled, high-quality teams. Our slate of educational content can help you optimize your team and build critical IT and business acumen, and we’re committed to producing the highest training ROI in the educational market. 

Call us today for a free consultation, and invest in the skills that will keep your business competitive.  

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