Thank you, Alexey Volosevich, very much for all your help in creating this blog post.
Coherent Solutions’ development center is one of the top employers of IT talent in Minsk, Belarus. As Coherent continues to grow past 500 employees in Belarus, ISsoft (the development center’s name in Minsk) faces the same issues with attracting – and keeping – the best employees as you do in America.
One of the ways we do that is to offer opportunities for career growth, including training. Since 2010, over 360 individuals have graduated from one of our courses, which are gaining in popularity all the time. 225 people passed one of the courses in 2014 to mid-2015!
(Note: “Individual” represents one person who has completed a single course. There are many individuals at ISsoft who have graduated from more than one of our training courses.)
Today we offer over 20 courses in the following areas:
- Mobile development
- .NET framework
- Java
- Web front-end technologies
- Databases
- Quality assurance
- Project management
- Business analysis
Specific courses vary over time, depending on business needs. In fact, the Training Center collaborates with ISsoft’s Career Development Department to research and review trends in IT, including new technologies and processes. Many of our employees contribute to these regular “Meet-Ups” where ideas, products and technologies are discussed.
Basically, our training falls into the following two categories:
Applied training
This is highly individualized training in which students are assigned a personal coach from among our highly experienced team. Together the student and coach design a personal study program which includes many tasks that correspond to a specific internal company project. The coach supervises and judges the quality of tasks over several months. When the coach feels the student is ready, the student moves onto new projects where s/he can apply the new skills s/he has learned.
Group classes
These classroom-style courses for up to 15 participants include lectures, practical tasks, and testing. These often explore the theory behind technologies or business practices, and then apply that learning to real world software development. These course offerings often come out of our internal “Meet-ups” where new technologies and trends are discussed.
The ISsoft Training Center includes a fully equipped lab with an IT-literature library, online educational resources, presentations, and many examples of code. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we are also able to offer our employees Microsoft Certified Professional designations through the tutorials and exams provided by Microsoft.
Besides training our own people, we welcome recent university graduates interested in working for Coherent Solutions/ISsoft. We have partnerships with all the leading Belarusian universities that can lead new grads to internships at ISsoft.