After Training Activities

Congratulations! You have just finished the technical training and ready to do something by yourself. But can you do that? Let us see what you should do after the training and how it can help you from a long-term perspective.

Planning

The very first thing you need to do is to plan your following actions. You need to understand three things — what you have to do, what you can do, and what you can not do.

Things you have to do are easy to get. Usually, you have a list of requirements from a customer who wants some features. Or you need to improve the current situation in some areas. Or maybe you have to start a completely new project. And so on.

Things you can do are not that tricky too. These are things you have to do, and you already have enough knowledge and experience after the training to do them.

Things you can not do are the most interesting here. You know the requirements, you may even understand them, but at the same time, you have no idea how to implement them. So you need extra help or support from a more experienced person, and the following chapter explains how to get them.

Support

Now knowing the list of things you can not do by yourself you need external help. There are several ways to get it.

You may ask for help from the same company who did the training. This is a great short-term solution, especially if the questions you want to ask are not that complicated, and you need only a couple of consulting sessions. The main advantage — you can get the required information quickly and with small effort. The main disadvantage — this approach does not work for complicated topics.

The next option is to hire a person with experience in the required area. This is a better long-term solution as this person can build the feature from scratch if needed and then support it. The main advantage — you can build a very complicated solution and be sure that it is going to work as you need. The main disadvantage — the cost of the development and support may be very high.

Finally, the last way is to find an expert and ask to design the solution and write the specification. This is a combination of the two approaches mentioned above. You are asking an experienced person to build an architecture (sometimes with a prototype) and explain how it has to work and then continuing work by yourself. This solution combines the advantages of both approaches mentioned above, and partially or completely reduces their disadvantages.

Action

When everything is ready, you have all the required information and experience you are finally ready to start work. If you planned everything you should not have major issues with the organization. However, you may face issues in the technical or business areas.

Technical issues are some unpredictable situations that may happen during the implementation phase. You may follow one of the three approaches mentioned above to resolve them and continue your work. Just make sure that you are not going to make the same mistake twice.

Business issues are much harder to predict and solve. You may face requirement changes, management team change, project reorganization, and so on. The only recommendation here is to identify issues as soon as possible and be proactive in dealing with them.

The best practices described in this article work fine not only in technical or software projects but in many other areas too. Feel free to adapt them to your environment and needs. Just remember that each project is unique and the team may need a certain level of flexibility to complete it.