How the 500-30-5 Scheme Makes IT Training Centers Useless

High-quality personnel has always been a pressing issue for IT. And the situation is not getting better every year – higher education is increasingly lagging behind the needs of the market, and mass online education has provided quantity, but not quality.

IT companies have good reason to complain about the lack of qualified specialists.

But when companies themselves begin to train personnel “for themselves,” they do so extremely ineffectively.

Statistics

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of most in-house training centers has not changed much over the 20 years that I have been involved in QA education both as a teacher and as an organizer.

Before preparing this material, I spoke with colleagues from internal training centers. On condition of anonymity, they agreed to provide me with statistics on recruitment and subsequent employment.

Here are the average data on training newcomers in testing in five internal training centers of well-known and not so well-known IT companies:

Number of applications received from applicants: on average 540

Number of enrolled students: on average 32

Number of people who completed their studies: on average 16

Number of people employed by the company: on average 5

So, of those selected and enrolled in training, only 1 in 6 students will ultimately benefit the company.

One could say that with free education this is a good conversion, but this is not true. After all, the entrance competition is 17 people per place (540/32) and, probably, much more impressive results could have been achieved.

The 15% of those initially enrolled who are employed falls into the same range as the 5-20% of those starting their IT careers after taking massive online testing courses.

Efficiency of internal training centers of IT companies

A wide funnel at the entrance of mass education, when more applicants are recruited, but less than 20% get employed – this is an economic intent that brings profit. After all, if a student does not complete his studies, he still manages to pay a significant amount.

But what is the intent behind such “efficiency” in corporate training?

It probably takes less than two man-months to publish announcements, sift through 540 applications, issue tests, and communicate with applicants and the team.

Teaching 30 students over several months would likely require a total of less than a man-year of curators, teachers and other staff.

Spend so much company resources just to hire 5 juniors later?

The economic feasibility raises certain doubts. After all, the same result can be achieved in two weeks of regular hiring on the market.

In rare cases, an in-house training center appears for the purpose of training highly specialized specialists in their subject area.
But among the surveyed representatives, only one training center does this, initially finding applicants with work experience in a specific field.

It seems that internal training centers of IT companies are organized solely based on reputational or image considerations.
“We are already a large company, and all our competitors have had their own certification centers for a long time.”

Questions of efficiency and, especially, cost-effectiveness clearly come second.

78% of those initially enrolled in training eventually find employment

This is the result achieved in one of my educational projects. It is several times, if not an order of magnitude, higher than the indicators that both mass and corporate education provide.

Next, I would like to draw attention to three key points that, from my point of view, decisively influence the effectiveness of training.

Which allow increasing the efficiency of training threefold, from 20+% to 70+% of students starting their careers.

Growth Point #1 – More Meaningful Selection

In some ways, this is a key growth point, since the maximum we can achieve in the following stages depends on its success.

I described the process of effective career guidance in my previous article, “How to accurately predict an IT applicant's future career (or lack thereof).”

The solution proposed there is to introduce a three-stage selection process, rather than asking people to fill out questionnaires or solve problems (which ChatGPT ultimately solves). This requires more work than usual, but it greatly increases efficiency and frees up resources in the following stages.

I can also add that a “cooling-off period” also works well. That is, when some time passes between the application and enrollment in training, preferably around 40-60 days.
Experience shows that students who “want to start studying as soon as possible” also quickly lose interest in learning.

Growth Point #2 – Learning Efficiency

Effective selection of only those “who both want and can learn” has a most direct positive effect on the motivation of teachers. And the effectiveness of training.

32 students, of which 5 will get a job

or

15 students recruited, 12 of whom will get jobs

?

There is a huge difference between these configurations.

Firstly, from the point of view of the quality of education.

When there are 30+ students in a group, theoretical training is the only format available to teachers. The main emphasis is on lectures, and students are encouraged to gain practical skills by completing homework.

15 students is the number that can provide practical training. When it is not in the form of lectures, which are absolutely useless for developing practical skills in students, but in the form of teamwork with maximum involvement of each student. When students in groups jointly solve the same real problems that they will later encounter in projects. This is especially relevant for testers, in whose training I specialize: half of the project work for them is interaction with other specialists, and not direct work with the product.

Secondly, the motivation of teachers also differs strikingly given the different quality of the entrance selection.

It's one thing to teach more than 30 people, of whom you know 25 will be “random fellow travelers”. In such conditions, it is quite difficult to fully invest, to give all your knowledge and skills.
It’s different when the number of such “random fellow travelers” is only 3. And you know for sure that most of your efforts will not be in vain.

And this again has a dramatic impact on the quality of education.

Growth Point #3 – Company Commitment and Motivation to Get Results

In all the IT companies where I participated in organizing internal training centers, the same problem was repeated.

When the training of the next group came to an end, it turned out that there was no need for specialists on the projects at that time.

“We have full-time people sitting on the bench, and some have already been laid off.
“Where do I need your Junes now?”

Of course, not every IT company's management has the ability to plan project loads for six months to a year in advance. Therefore, there will be no advice here: “Get your planning in order – if you decided to create a training center, launched it for several months, trained it for several months, and then it turned out that there were vacancies for only three people, then you wasted your money.”

I will suggest more realistic options.

Solution – Guaranteed Experience

If a company provides some guarantees for students' education, it should also provide at least minimal guarantees for work experience.

Is it possible to hire all those who successfully complete the training as full-time employees?
This needs to be done.

Is it not possible to take everyone?
So, hire someone on staff, and take the rest for a two-month internship, albeit unpaid. The student will gain experience and the opportunity to honestly say at an interview at another company that he had experience working on a short-term project.

Solution – Create motivation for teachers for the result, not the process

Teachers live in the same reality. They teach because they want some other activity besides working on the project, they have free time in the evening, they like the teaching process, and so on.
For them, it is not important how many students will ultimately find work in the company, and sometimes the quality of the classes themselves is not so important.

When I was working with one of the corporate training centers, it sometimes got to the point of being funny.
A teacher goes on a long business trip, a replacement is urgently sought for his classes, but no one wants to be distracted from the project, as a result, the classes are given to just someone who, after much persuasion, agreed.
Suddenly, the replacement also drops out of the process.
A replacement teacher is being sought. He comes to the rehearsal of the lesson, but after 5 minutes it turns out that he hasn't even looked at the training materials and doesn't know what to say at all.

At the same time, HR specialists and project managers live in a different reality with their own tasks. Recruiting seniors needs to be done now, while juniors are too distant for the company's future and are not a priority.
Rarely does even the simplest thing happen – that information about opening vacancies and needs for specific projects reaches those participating in the educational process.

As a result, the training has the characteristics of being optional for all parties.

The company assumes by default that it does not need most of the students.

Students receive a process without the expected result – “yes, few will find employment, but we study for free, so we don't look a gift horse in the mouth.”

The teachers on the staff simply get some kind of paid hobby.

HRs check the box that the training center is operating.

There is a simple way to increase the motivation of all actors to get results and simultaneously activate the lower horizontal connections in the company. Namely, make the training for students conditionally paid. And use the funds received to pay a bonus to teachers for the employment of each student on the project.

For students, a conditional payment, say $100, will not scare off those who are serious about an IT career. But it will initially filter out those who like free stuff, “eternal students”, and motivate them to study until they achieve results.

The $100 received from each student goes to the teacher if the student finds a place in the company. For teachers, this will create motivation not only to perceive training as a process, but also to build horizontal connections within the company – to achieve results.

“How are things on the project? Are you going to look for another middle? Listen, before HR posts the vacancy, maybe Alena should take a look at two of our smart graduates? She's a good mentor as a lead. She quickly brought your two juniors up to middle. And you'll save your budget. What do you think?”

This will motivate teachers to take a more objective approach to the educational process and to find out current needs in projects. After all, learning now happens not for the sake of learning, but for the sake of the result.

I assure you that in this case, teachers will have higher requirements for homework and overall academic performance. Teachers will constantly keep in mind the future lack of shame in front of colleagues for incompetent newcomers.

Conclusions

Educational processes within IT companies are usually unprofitable and ineffective. The cost of resources spent on training significantly exceeds the cost of hiring on the open market.

Deeper selection at the entrance.
A decrease in the number of students enrolled while simultaneously increasing demands.
Motivating teachers to achieve results rather than participate in the process.
With the help of these simple organizational changes, the efficiency of educational processes can be increased many times over.

The resulting increase in the conversion rate “from applicant to employee” from 20% to 70+% turns internal training from a meaningless ritual into a tool that actually saves the company’s budget.
And it really does provide the company with the required number of qualified personnel.