Any tips for training an Intern Web Developer?

[Ejeckt]

So the company needs some fresh talent, but budget limits us to hiring and upskilling juniors. The need for additional developers is not immediate so everything sort of lines up to support the plan to invest in training. I've taken it upon myself to bring on an Intern. The guy is very tech savvy and has good roots (has actually built basic apps in excel VBA), but otherwise is starting almost from scratch with OOP. In the lead up to making him an offer, he spent some time going through Udemy type of video tutorials, and I believe he is certainly capable of learning this craft fairly quickly.

He's starting in September and it falls on me to oversee his training. We're estimating that he will need 2-3 months of general training before we start introducing him to our codebase and giving him stories to work on.

My other work has me busy with a Greenfields project with relatively relaxed deadlines, so I will be available to support him an hour or two a day. The rest of the time I would like to steer him in the right direction and curate content for him to go through.

I have personally gone through quite a few nice Pluralsight/Udemy courses over the years, so I'm thinking some of those might be appropriate. Then I can come up with some basic projects (like build an API that does X in ASP.NET).

Any suggestions? On a personal note, I'm rather pleased to have this opportunity. Years ago I did an HR degree and spent a few years in HR, and training was a part of that, so I'm eager to see if I can make this work as there is a part of me that would like to explore training/mentoring as a potential future career path.

Edit: Full Stack Angular & .NET

 

[Pho3nix]

Wed Development in 100 days on Udemy and give him smaller projects that line up you your current stack.

 

[B-1]

Its fairly straight forward if the candidate is a self starter. I like to follow the "agile" way and do morning standups to cover the previous and new days work/study, do retros to evaluate successes and areas to improve(with code reviews etc), have a backlog of things to get done, etc.
This teaches them some of the sdlc while they are learning and is a good way to keep track of and move things along.
Also have them involved in their own growth so don't tell them to do x course give them a budget and ask them to find the right course(with assistance of requirements/expectations).
Just note its a pretty big investment and as soon as they are skilled enough they become in demand and recruiters will hound them constantly so you need to make sure you have constant catchup sessions to make sure they are happy with the work environment, renumeration and their role.

 

[Barbarian Conan]

Some courses teaching him the basics.
Get him into the codebase asap. It is easy to become demotivated if you only do training for a month. You also only really learn if you try and do, then fail.

Edit: you can in addition to this give him small side projects to learn a specific skill like OO or whatever, but get him contributing within the first month.

 

[_kabal_]

Yeah. Do as little training as possible to get to the point where the training can then continue in the code base. Doing real work is 10x the learning compared to course material, at least for me. And they won’t be yet infected with kak like OOP and SOLID….

 

[randomcat]

As an intern, I find Udemy very demotivating. Knowledge is important but applying that knowledge makes it stick.