About 3 years ago now (in 2014, time flies) I had two past students who had graduated from our community college and then gone on to get their Bachelors in Computer Science who hadn't been able to find jobs after graduating and that had been maybe in 2010/2011 or so. I worked with one in the Spring and then the other during the Fall semester.
They each were very much at a beginner level so I essentially started providing them with books out of my library and having them work through those and me providing lots of feedback to them and guiding them up in their skills (starting with HTML, CSS and working up to JavaScript and modern PHP programming, with things like Composer/Packagist and new frameworks like Laravel coming into the conversations and also trying to introduce them to other needed developer skills like Git/Github that would help make them employable).
In each case they were volunteering for that semester with my small Online Services department of one (me), so my main goal was building up their skills so they could be marketable next time they started applying for positions and I wasn't trying to use them for just building things I needed to build (if anything, I spent quite a bit of one on one time with them and took them out to lunch most of the days they spent with me a few times each week).
My work at the time was a bit all over the place so I wasn't doing a ton of development myself but I had been adding in a lot of these skills too so it was good to review with them and share what I had learned which in also helped reinforce my own knowledge too.
Kind of in the middle of the semester and then toward the end I gave them a realistic mini-project or two that they could work through for the college that way they can have something to point to that they had done (one of the things I remember sharing with each of them is that in an interview it's really nice to be able to point out specific stories/scenarios/projects that you've worked on to share).
Locally those jobs are pretty rare, but luckily the first guy was able to apply for a job that had come up just a month or so after the Spring semester and get one of the good local jobs in web development. For the second guy it took a little longer, but he ended up being able to get a position in San Diego and he and his wife moved up there (his wife needed to transfer to another school for her work, but I think it at all panned out for them).
I rarely get to talk with anyone else locally about what I do, so in that way it's pretty lonely so when I do have someone locally that's interested in programming/development it's always nice to share and help them out.
It's hard to keep up on an ongoing basis since it is pretty energy intensive, but it's definitely nice/rewarding when you do have good people to mentor.
They each were very much at a beginner level so I essentially started providing them with books out of my library and having them work through those and me providing lots of feedback to them and guiding them up in their skills (starting with HTML, CSS and working up to JavaScript and modern PHP programming, with things like Composer/Packagist and new frameworks like Laravel coming into the conversations and also trying to introduce them to other needed developer skills like Git/Github that would help make them employable).
In each case they were volunteering for that semester with my small Online Services department of one (me), so my main goal was building up their skills so they could be marketable next time they started applying for positions and I wasn't trying to use them for just building things I needed to build (if anything, I spent quite a bit of one on one time with them and took them out to lunch most of the days they spent with me a few times each week).
My work at the time was a bit all over the place so I wasn't doing a ton of development myself but I had been adding in a lot of these skills too so it was good to review with them and share what I had learned which in also helped reinforce my own knowledge too.
Kind of in the middle of the semester and then toward the end I gave them a realistic mini-project or two that they could work through for the college that way they can have something to point to that they had done (one of the things I remember sharing with each of them is that in an interview it's really nice to be able to point out specific stories/scenarios/projects that you've worked on to share).
Locally those jobs are pretty rare, but luckily the first guy was able to apply for a job that had come up just a month or so after the Spring semester and get one of the good local jobs in web development. For the second guy it took a little longer, but he ended up being able to get a position in San Diego and he and his wife moved up there (his wife needed to transfer to another school for her work, but I think it at all panned out for them).
I rarely get to talk with anyone else locally about what I do, so in that way it's pretty lonely so when I do have someone locally that's interested in programming/development it's always nice to share and help them out.
It's hard to keep up on an ongoing basis since it is pretty energy intensive, but it's definitely nice/rewarding when you do have good people to mentor.