iSYS Academy – where theory meets practice

Since July 2022, we have had the iSYS Academy, a team of trainees, working students and young professionals who are responsible for our in-house applications. The basic idea behind this is to provide practical training that offers concrete insights into specific fields of application. We spoke to Christian Fröhler, Head of the iSYS Academy, about the origins and aims of our trainee programme.

Hello Christian, first of all, what is the iSYS Academy?

The iSYS Academy is an in-house project that teaches prospective software developers the entire software design process using real-life examples. When our new employees start their careers or graduate, they usually come to us with a lot of theoretical knowledge but little technical expertise. We want to give them a protected space in which they can go through all the steps of software development with us before they start working on external customer projects.

How did the iSYS Academy come to be founded?

The basic idea of the Academy has existed at iSYS for many years. We have a tradition of programming our in-house applications ourselves. We have always involved prospective software developers/trainees and students in this process. In July 2022, we then decided to bundle all these parallel initiatives into one concept and that’s how the iSYS Academy was born.

What is it like to work in the iSYS Academy team?

As many members of the Academy tell me, it is very cordial and cooperative – people help each other. We go through the software development process together in close collaboration with employees who have been in the job for years. We use Scrum as an agile process model. The role of Scrum Master is played by alternating members of the Academy team. The iterative approach allows us to see the whole picture of software development. We start with the requirements analysis for the software, then move on to planning and realising the tasks and on to implementation. Quality assurance and finally going live and DevOps are also part of our concept. By the end, every member of the Academy will have experienced at least one complete run-through and will be familiar with all phases of software development.

So, in principle, you can develop your programming skills in the protected space of iSYS and then use the knowledge you have acquired to face the customer?

Exactly, it’s like a runway for budding software developers, where Academy members can help each other as well as being mentored by our experts. We are constantly collecting feedback from members and they have been very satisfied so far. Many former members have told us that the Academy has made them feel much more confident in supporting their first customers.

What is the plan for the future of the iSYS Academy?

Our aim is to constantly improve the Academy. We are currently establishing two concepts with which we can teach our members the process of software development even more precisely. The first is our mentoring concept. Every new member is assigned a direct contact person from iSYS who is always on hand to answer questions. We have also introduced crash courses. Here, our employees teach the technical skills of their speciality within one hour and thus form the basis for subsequent exercises.

Within the first six months, the Academy has received a lot of positive feedback both within iSYS and from our customers, which we are very pleased about. We have seen that the internal, practical training of our young professionals makes it much easier for them to work with customers later on. That’s why we want to continue expanding the Academy and are looking forward to welcoming new faces to the iSYS Academy soon.

Thank you Christian for your time!

Always happy to help.

Would you like to become part of the team?

You can find all the information here:

Career at iSYS