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The Pentalog Incubator

The Pentalog Incubator

In order to support the development of competences and the sharing of knowledge, Pentalog has created a true internal training structure: "The Pentalog Incubator".

Objectives

  • Develop relations with universities
  • Train young people in developing IT projects
  • Improve the technical, functional, linguistic and managerial skills of our staff
  • Capitalize on knowledge

Incubator Functions:

  • IT internships
  • Continuing professional education

The program is both for young students who wish to acquire a first technical experience, and to employees who have specific professional training.

The services provided by the Incubator are focused on six main areas:

  • Java Development
  • Project management
  • Business Intelligence
  • Quality assurance (development and management processes, testing activities)
  • System and network administration
  • Language training (French, English, German, Romanian, Vietnamese)

The products delivered by the incubator consist mainly of knowledge:

  • Research Reports
  • Training media - exercises/examples
  • Reusable application tools (frameworks)

Incubator production can be either internal (internal IS applications) or external (customer services).

Internships

An internship is often a gateway to Pentalog. The program allows both parties to get to know each other and see if they share common goals in terms of their development strategies.

  • Intermittent program since 2003, ongoing since 2007: 218 traineeships since the beginning of 2007
  • 85% of interns have been hired
  • Minimum period - 3 months, presence - 20hrs per week
  • Training program of 2-4 weeks
  • Follow-up of a full project cycle
  • Permanent Assessment
  • Coaching

A tutor or coach follows and monitors the new trainee. The duration of this monitoring period is based on the experience of the trainee, his needs and the duration of the internship. The coach also helps the student to integrate from a social perspective. This coach is chosen from among the teams and is not part of the management. A future project manager starts by working on small projects within the "Incubator".

Professional Training

The strength of Pentalog lies in the skills of its employees. The projects carried out by our teams are developed using various technologies and development languages. Thanks to this, the general strategy of the company includes major investment in preparing and training our employees. Pentalog provides all the necessary resources to ensure that team members master all the new technologies available on the market.

Our consultants are constantly "returning to school" to learn the latest technology and methodologies and procedures. The standards of development that we use are those of CMMI. When proposing an employee to a client, Pentalog chooses someone who knows the rules of the fixed-price project. He/she is therefore a seasoned professional who has previously faced high result-related constraints (both in development and in infrastructure management).

The Pentalog policy of continuing education is based on 3 principles:

  • Internal knowledge sharing:

The knowledge accumulated by each team member in a certain technical or functional area, through mentoring or working in various projects, is shared with all employees through knowledge bases updated regularly (the application infrastructure of each current project includes a wiki environment). In this way, all employees who want to learn and improve their skill levels have access to the findings and implemented details of other projects, in a continuous exchange of experience.
A complementary form of sharing knowledge is represented by the ETH sessions (E-Training Hours), specific to our multi-site organization. These are video, audio and text webcasts of various short technical presentations, carried out by voluntary Pentalog employees and which are addressed to everyone, on various subjects of general interest. These presentations include a section of questions and answers and can be reviewed later.
The involvement and the regularity with which our employees exchange their experiences and are open to improving their skills are among the criteria for calculating quarterly incentives.

  • Internal training:

Internal training is the second area of improving the knowledge of our employees. Organized within an annual training plan or added to the general planning depending on project requirements, these training sessions are mostly provided by qualified employees. However, if the skills are not available internally, Pentalog uses external trainers.
In both cases, the logistic organization relies on the same requirements that we establish for our customers: validating prerequisites, planning the course in detail and customizing it, booking training rooms, installing virtual machines and the environment necessary for training, gathering feedback and sharing of exercises.
By applying these training mechanisms, our teams are as a whole better equipped to face a variety of technologies and different functional areas, allowing Pentalog to respond better and more quickly to any customer requests.
5465,4 training days were carried out in 2011 by Pentalog collaborators and 1639,6 training days were carried out by the

interns through Pentalog's internship continuous program, developed in all our agencies from Romania, Republic of Moldavia, France and Vietnam.

Here are few examples of types of training provided in 2011:

  • Java
  • .NET
  • PHP
  • Mobile Apps (Android)
  • E-Entreprise (Magento, Drupal)
  • Web interfaces (HTML5/CSS3, jQuery)
  • Business Objects
  • Databases
  • Software Testing
  • People and project management
  • SCRUM Management
  • Communication and client relation
  • Financial training
  • Foreign languages (French, Romanian, English, German, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian)

Internships since 2007: 218.
Besides the proactive mechanisms to upgrade the skills of our employees, another important aspect of our policy of continuing education is to offer customer missions abroad, a possibility which is granted to every employee. Each team member is prepared to carry out short or long missions in France, Germany, or in any other country where our customers are based. These missions are designed to enable each employee to learn the Pentalog work methods and to communicate directly with their colleagues and perhaps to discover a foreign country, with its beauties and peculiarities.
Among the various tasks performed for our French or European customers, our employees have the opportunity to learn their business, improve their customer communication skills and better understand their needs.

  • R&D and technological watch:

For each area of interest in our enterprise, an employee is appointed to maintain a constant technological surveillance. His role is to permanently assess innovations in technology together with the Technical Director, new functional designs, technical and conceptual ideas in their field, and make recommendations on the need to train teams concerning these new aspects.
The Pentalog research center is a structure that is integrated in the "Incubator" and focuses especially on these new technologies reported by the employees who monitor the latest breakthroughs. A large part of the benchmarking is entrusted to this center.











 

Contact

Beatrice A. Stanescu
Program Manager
Strada M. Kogalniceanu, Nr 17,
Bloc C4, etaj 9,
500090 Brasov, Romania
Tel. : +40 268 547 775
Fax : +40 268 547 775

 

 

 

 

 

 

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