A hands-on experience: a full-stack mentoring program for JavaScript engineers
In this article, you’ll discover what catalyzed the introduction of the Full-Stack Mentoring Program for JS engineers, see how it is organized and what benefits it brings to participants, as well as meet the mentors, and first graduates.
Introduction
During the Full-Stack Cascade Mentoring Program for JavaScript, EPAMers worked on a sandbox project and in just 3.5 months tried themselves in various roles and mastered their skills in different areas.
What triggered the program
The Full-Stack Cascade Mentoring Program for advanced JavaScript engineers addresses three challenges.
- Firstly, we have sandbox and internal projects that can be developed further.
- Secondly, these projects can help us test whether a specific idea or technology is viable.
- Finally, and most importantly, our engineers want to develop in cross-stack – and it’s essential to let them try different technologies and stacks and grow in them.
Hands-on advanced JS education
The main twist of the Full-Stack Mentoring Program for advanced JavaScript engineers is that every participant works on both front-end and back-end and is actively involved in the development processes. This way, mentees get a taste of what it takes to be a full-stack engineer and can decide whether they want to advance in this direction.
At the same time, Program organizers give as many non-coding activities as possible. Mentees collaborate with other teams, write support requests, figure out how to solve non-standard situations, and so on.
This run of the Full-Stack Mentoring Program for JS covered:
- How to build a project from scratch according to business needs and how to deal with FRs and NFRs
- Leadership, management and overall soft skills
- Approaches to modern application development in the Agile way
- Serverless Architecture
- Microservices architecture
- infrastructure and services
- Serverless Framework
- Performance, Logging, Monitoring and other DevSecOps practices
- ReactJS
- NodeJS
- CI/CD practices
The Project Manager and Delivery Manager define the overall flow and set the product goal that the team should achieve during the Program (3-3.5 months). Mentees do not receive any scores – success is evaluated according to the project milestones that the team reaches together.
Naturally, the Program’s hands-on format requires high motivation because the Full-Stack Program for JavaScript challenges JS developers with actual engineering tasks that they need to handle straight away.
During their education, mentees consider all aspects of solution development, including project setup, architecture, testing, deployment, integration, and further improvements. Thanks to strong engagement in the project and its idea, they develop product and engineering thinking and contribute creative ideas – making learning even more meaningful.
What mentees get as a result
Due to the ‘real-life’ format, engineers need to devote quite a lot of time and effort to the Full-Stack Program for JS. But these efforts are feasible: provided high involvement, mentees can accelerate their growth and successfully apply their full-stack experience in projects that EPAM offers.
The participants are on a genuine engineering and problem-solving path. In the Full-Stack Mentoring Program for JS, mentees master not only a new technology stack - they also master a pack of must-have skills: communication, accountability, responsibility, leadership, and teamwork.
All mentees went through a final interview an with IT mentor and received detailed feedback on their progress. This will help engineers to evaluate the knowledge they gained and define Personal Career Development Plans with their Skill Managers.
The Full-Stack Cascade Mentoring Program for advanced JS engineers is technical at its core, but it also provides space to improve managerial skills. Such mentoring programs cultivate managerial capabilities and help software engineers advance professionally across multiple stacks.