The culture of self-development (especially in the IT industry) has always been important. Each company approaches this topic in its own way to create and offer a solution that is most suitable to the organization and meets the employees’ needs. Some companies set training funds, invite experts to conduct in-house training, organizes their own meetups, or conferences where employees can share the knowledge and acquire it.
Our Team is our foundation #thestrongestteam. At VirtusLab we continuously refine our environment to reflect this – to make it more supportive. We really value the personal growth of our employees, so we have all the training benefits mentioned above – we invite trainers and specialists to our company to share their expertise with us, e.g. last year we had a chance to host Martin Odersky.
We are also contributing to the local tech community by launching meetups groups like KSUG, KJUG, Cloud Native, Data Science, IoT, and many others. Each year, we welcome speakers and participants from all over the globe to our conference – Sphere.it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we moved online and have been organizing micro.sphere.it – tech-oriented online sessions dedicated to technology in its broadest sense.
But the most important, and also the most “exclusive” benefit is our internal tech training division – Virtusity.
It is a training division of VirtusLab, founded in 2017. First, this branch was created to offer the highest quality IT training in the market. We also became an accredited training center of the Lightbend company (it stands behind the development of such technologies like Scala and Akka Platform). Thanks to that, our employees developed their competences and became accredited Lightbend trainers, which allowed us to build a training offer for other companies (such as Allegro, WBK Bank, Future Processing, XTRF, Huawei or Keen.io).
At the same time, Virtuslab has been dynamically developing and increased its team up to over 200 employees. That was also connected with a significant change in needs within the company. We knew, that due to the intensive growth of the company, we must focus on our own team. Thus, since 2019, Virtusity acts as our exclusive, internal training division. Virtusity’s training offer has also changed – our expertise has allowed us to build our own, specially prepared courses. So far, the most popular ones are pySpark for Data Science and TypeScript for JavaScript Engineers.
In 2019, training took place on average every month, with 6 brand new, specially designed courses. Our trainers spent over 76 hours conducting training, and Virtusity’s workshops hosted over 90 participants. Some of them were our community members, for whom we have always booked several places – as VirtusLab really wants to stay close & contribute to the local tech community.
We are glad that Virtusity’s courses please the members of our community.
Last year I was lucky enough to take part in two courses organized by Virtusity – Scala Expert and Akka Pro. It was a great experience, despite my prior knowledge on these topics, I was still able to learn a lot. Trainers were very professional and helpful, it was obvious that they have a lot of deep knowledge on the subject. What I really liked was the emphasis on learning by practice, as there were many exercises to do during the course. I definitely recommend it
Łukasz Gruba
Therefore, this year we have some more great news for the community members – the number of places for our training will increase! The information about courses for the community is available via their meetup group sites – do not hesitate to join us there to be up-to-date with our open training!
After a years-long way through the various internal and external training, we got back to where it all started when the initiative was to offer the highest possible quality IT training by the #VLteam for the #VLteam. The gained experience empowers our trainers to run a wide variety of tech-oriented workshop dedicated to programming languages and technologies to make the coding more effective. So this year, we decided to put more emphasis on our own’s training and launch the most popular ones again. In addition, we are constantly working on creating new courses, such as Kotlin Introduction, Lagom: Battle-tested way to build microservices, Adventure time with HTML & CSS, and many more.
In 2020 we also made another important step in the development of our training offer – we have created a special IT course for our non-technical teams (HR, office, marketing, and others). The main purpose is to increase awareness of the work of our technical teams and to transfer basic tech knowledge for VL’s non-tech teams. Recently, we conducted the first course like this (Adventure time with HTML & CSS mentioned above) and there are already first positive references after that training from the community members:
The training conducted by VirtusLab turned out to be a hit! Having no experience in programming in HTML and CSS, I learned about the basic principles of programs in a pleasant way. The trainer led us through the issues in a concise and transparent way, with a dose of good humor. Thanks to it, I realized that the programming world for a non-technical person, like myself, is also open. All you have to do is to have enough time and willingness. I am looking forward to the next training!
Izabela Lindner
Hope to see you at our next course! 😉
