When I tell people about that we recruit people with no IT experience and teach them to be IT consultants, they frequently ask what it's like working with people without experience. After doing it for a couple of years, I can honestly say, it's no different than working with anybody else. This is frequently a surprise to people who think people without experience won't know how to behave or how to do anything. They think we'll have to be firm, or 'cruel to be kind,' to get results and to keep them from dropping off the apprenticeship.
We understand this view, but don't subscribe to it. We don't want to be the same as other companies, so we don't treat them the same as other companies. Ours is a company where we value autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We use a cardwall to ensure everything that needs to be done is visible to the whole company; break things into pieces to give us a chance to iterate and constantly improve; don't judge other's behaviour; and ensure we always focus on the area that needs our attention the most.*
This changes things. In an organisation that keeps information hidden, people can't learn how to behave, or what to do, without making mistakes, or being told (which frequently takes the form of 'behaviour management'). By opening up the needs of the organisation so everybody can see them and can choose what to work on, we ensure that even people with no experience can find something to do that needs to get done, and which they're willing to take on. This appeals to their desire to achieve mastery, and their autonomy, and we do it for everybody.
Our process comes with risks. Sometimes people get lost. They don't know what to do, or they don't know how to structure their work so it's achievable. Our job (regardless of experience level) is to help people figure out what needs to be done, and how to make it possible. Sometimes that's me asking apprentices questions, and sometimes it's them asking me questions. It's a give and take based on equality and respect, where experience and length of service mean less than empathy and learning, and the more you know, the more likely you are to spend your time helping people who know less.
Sometimes people make mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable, if you're learning, and pushing boundaries. For us, the important thing is to learn from those mistakes - to reflect on the process that lead to the mistake, rather than who is responsible for making it - so we can do things differently in the future. We approach every project, every task, every need as the current step in an iteration. Learning is an ongoing process which never ends. Our apprentices start out shadowing more experienced consultants and working on a service desk. Over time (6-9 months), they pick up enough experience to run their own small, supervised projects. In the next 9 months, they start running projects on their own and mentoring new apprentices. Within 18 months, they go from knowing nothing about IT to running their own projects and taking responsibility for the results, challenges, and learning.
It is my sincere privilege to watch them grow and change, learn and improve, and to embrace and unleash their own potential. They learn to look within themselves for their self-worth, and I couldn't be prouder of them for it.
*How we do these will (probably) be explored in later posts. As with everything else, this is an ongoing work in progress.
You can read my follow-up post here.
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