Coaching is for the passionate few who want to be more than just an Engineer, or a Manager, or a Teacher, or a Consultant: you want to help people progress in their careers at an unbelievable rate. You want to help them change their lives, to power the organisations they work with, and to make the industry and even world a better place.
How do I know I should be a Coach?
As a Coach, your role is to help people grow. You should consider this career shift if you’re ready to take your technical knowledge even further. You empathise with learners, always thinking from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know, and taking actions to understand the reasoning behind their blocker in order to help them grow. You’re excited about education and using different techniques and styles to deliver better results than what we’re seeing now. You have a desire to grow in your own learning. You also believe everyone should have the ability to access tech education and employment. Historically, tech has been a career path only accessible for the privileged few. You want to be part of changing the bias by building accessible training and collaborating with like-minded changemakers and hiring partners across the industry.
Josué Estévez Fernández — Careers Pod Lead at Makers: “Soon after I onboarded at my previous company, I was one of the devs responsible for mentoring new joiners that came into the team from different graduate programmes. And that’s exactly when I started to realise that I should seriously consider becoming a full-time coach.”
Léo Hetsch — Academy Curriculum Lead: “I’ve decided to become a coach as teaching is something that I’ve had in mind since the start of my career, and I’ve always loved to help others grow and learn — I even used to organise a few evening classes here and there with my uni friends, whenever they needed some help with programming classes.
You’ll be more than just a Coach.
Coach
Through active listening and questions, you’ll help learners reflect on their learning, their goals, the problems they are facing and the solutions they may try.
Mentor
You’ll use your own experience as a professional developer to model skills and behaviour necessary to be a Software Engineer.
Technical expert
You’ll use your technical knowledge to give expert feedback to learners as well as to help guide them towards solving their own problems.
Emotional support
The learning experience can be intense. Learners are often under a lot of stress and financial pressure. You should be there to support them and help them make the best choices they can.
Education expert
Using recognised educational tools, you’ll help the learners organise their learning, sequence material, rebuild their mental models and ultimately become independent self-learners.
How do I develop myself while developing others?
John Forster — Software Engineering Coach: Part of being a coach is having expertise in a number of tech stacks, and there is always more to learn. Having a breadth of knowledge over a large domain of technologies requires you to develop a deep understanding of the underlying concepts. This depth means that you get faster and faster at picking up new technologies as you go, which is useful, because you don’t always know exactly what you will be teaching next month!
The courses we run cover a huge range of tech stacks, from JS and Ruby, to Java, Python and C#. We’ve run courses on iOS development in Swift, DevOps and Terraform, even COBOL! The more you learn, the better you teach, and the more you teach, the better you get at learning!
Coaching at Makers
Your day-to-day will include delivering workshops, 1:1’s, group sessions, drop-in sessions, but also working to consistently improve our curriculum, systems, and structure, to ensure we are in a place to successfully deliver our educational philosophy.
Immersive Engineering Training
The core of our approach is immersive engineering training. Learners of all backgrounds join us full-time to gain modern tech engineering skills and become adaptive self-directed learners who can quickly become productive members of any dev team. Coaches run workshops, provide 1:1 support, give feedback and overall ensure that learners learn.
Specialist Training
Some of our engineers go on to study specific specialisms targeted towards their roles. For example, DevOps and SRE, Engineering Leadership, or use of specific stacks. Coaches take on the challenge of curriculum development and iteration, supported by our educational tools and ethos.
Do you have a specialism you want to share? Let’s talk about it! We’re always looking for great coaches. Whenever you read this, we’re ready to hear from you contact Sandy Vo — Makers Talent Partner.
