How we practice Adult Learning in our Gojek Engineering Bootcamp
A year ago, I was standing in front of the first to sixth graders in one of the elementary school in Nunukan, North Kalimantan, teaching English using creative materials such as drawings, songs, and videos as I served as one of the corps for Indonesia Teaches Movement.
But it’s a different story now, I’m helping the adult engineers to get a learning experience through an intensive Engineering Bootcamp in Bangalore, India for Indonesia’s first & largest Tech Unicorn, Gojek. These contrast made me realize that learning experience is unique and differ.
A bit of context, Engineering Bootcamp is an accelerated & intensive 2,5 months program to incubate Gojek engineers in a culture of discipline, continuous learning, and self-reliance. It’s divided to 6 modules from Core Engineering, DevOps, Android, iOS, Data Science, and Security, All of these are delivered by our own engineers.
Adult Learning
I think everyone agree that adults learn differently from child, one of the key differences is from the orientation of learning.
Adult will learn efficiently on something relevant to their professional work or career aspiration, in contrast young-learner is more on subject-centered, they can learn any subject in sequence.
All of those above mentioned writing is a theory that we call Andragogy. One of the prominent figure for this is Malcom S Knowles, where he introduce 4 Principles Of Andragogy In 1984, Knowles suggested 4 principles that are applied to adult learning:
- Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
- Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for the learning activities.
- Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life.
- Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented. (Kearsley, 2010)
These 4 principles, is performed on our 3rd cycle of Engineering Bootcamp. Here is how we deal with this.
Discuss as a group, come up with one solution
The daily assignment force everyone to work as a group, by agreeing on the same convention for the programming language. The process isn’t easy at all as debates is inevitable, and differences is surface.
We facilitate debates and let both side spoke and respond, and decide as a group then move fast. The best part of it is their involvement in taking decision as a group, committed, and moving on.
What we promotes is to eliminate “I think/In my opinion/I Feel” since it’s hinder discussion, killing the process of having disagreement. By this decision making process, these folks are involved in the planning & evaluation of their works.
Evaluate your group through Leaderboard & Happy Sheet
“You will work together for life, not just for these 2 months of bootcamp” these line emphasize several times during Bootcamp. Our coaches are the good evidence of it, even though they’ve spread out to various place in the industry, the collaboration still apparent.
That’s the reason why the evaluation is as a group, instead of individual. We assessing it by Leaderboard, where we track sets of metrics that could track the group progress.
One of the metrics is the number of deleted code (rm -rf), whenever failing to apply non-negotiable etiquette resulted to deleting all the code and start again from scratch. We track all of these numbers and present it first thing in every morning. Thrive as a group
Happy Sheet is another thing, a feedback mechanism where everyone will assess the today’s session with some indicators such as coaches delivery, interaction, and even insights for the day. The next day we present the summary of it and discuss how can we improve.
It stretch from how group can manage better coordination in time, adding more shorter breaks, minimize class distraction, and knowledge transfer for upcoming coordinator of the day. The highlight is they are all experience failures and learn from that. We iterate and getting better, in daily bases.
We’re not only learn, we’re applying learning
Another emphasis is about learning. Most of adults said, I’ve learned a lot and got lots of insights. But unable to apply their learning, indicated by repeating mistakes and negligence on improvement.
In contrast with young learner, adults experience more from their life span and got knowledge from a various sources. That’s why Bootcamp isn’t just a place to dig new knowledge, but to apply the knowledge that have been accumulated.
The mixture of Bootcampers profile ranging from different nationalities, division, and working level has add a dynamic of knowledge too. They have pushed to learn from one another.
Teaching adult is a challenging process as it takes a maturity and motivation to not only learn, but also unlearn. Ready to empty the glass to get the newer flow of water. Beyond that, we’re letting them to obsessed to improve their personal skills and add any stacks that relates to their professional life.
GO-JEK is one company that invest so much in the development of it’s people, not just flowing dollar to fund the program. But to spare our senior engineers to teach directly, one of them is our Head of Engineering to coach directly for one month!
