How to involve more juniors in development projects?

We all know that there is a serious lack of senior developers all over the world. And most of us also know that a crucial part of the solution is to hire junior talents and grow them into seniors.

But how to successfully do this is still unknown for most businesses. What they especially want to know, is how to get juniors involved in a way that won’t interfere with their short-term goals.

Here are three different ways to answer the how.

1. Go out and hire junior tech talents

The first one is obvious: in order involve more junior developers somebody needs to hire them. Why not you?

You can’t hire junior talents into more advanced roles, so you will need to create junior positions. Most junior developers are eager to both prove themselves and to learn more, so we believe that you will be positively surprised by how fast they will become valuable team members - especially with quality coaching.

2. Create a trainee program

A trainee program is a great way to bring in junior developers, especially if you need to hire new people regularly. You’ll be able to provide a structured environment where they will quickly acquire the necessary skills to become productive members of your development team.

Creating, running, and maintaining a trainee program can, however, be expensive and time consuming. You will need dedicated coaches responsible for the program. Your team’s senior developers can act as instructors, but it will divert their attention away from their development duties. And if the trainee program isn’t designed or ran properly, it might prove to be ineffective.

3. Get an entire team from Crowd Collective – and hire some of them

A great option is to employ an entire team, including seniors and juniors, from Crowd Collective. Our senior consultants will have a dual role: they’ll function as coaches to the junior developers while simultaneously working as senior developers on your product. After a while, the senior consultants will leave, and you’ll be able to hire the fully on-boarded juniors into your team as official in-house employees.

Our approach is flexible and can be tailored to your needs. Eg. You can bring us in to coach your already hired junior developers or you can hire our experienced consultants to help your senior team members become coaches themselves.

But no matter the specifics, we will help you bring in junior talents and turn them into fully fledged members of your in-house development team.

Read more about our approach >>

A good coach means everything

As is made clear above, proper coaching is essential in order to make the most of junior tech talents’ potential. There are three ways to go about acquiring senior talents to act as a coach.

  1. Maybe there is someone in your team already, who has the soft skills as well as the technical competence to help your junior team members grow. Just make sure that you don’t overwork your seniors by just adding coaching on top their current duties.

  2. You can hire a coach. But seeing as the difficulty of hiring seniors is why you are developing junior talents in the first place, this might not be the easiest way.

  3. Or you can hire one (or more) of our experienced IT consultants to be the coach. Our consultants are equipped with high technical competence and the soft skills to make people around them grow.


Read more about our approach: “Get a team of developers, hire some of them"