This article describes the training program of a financial services company that takes nontechnical workers and converts them into software engineers in ten months (including a three-week vacation!). The approach is mostly as one might anticipate: start with some overview of software engineering, work on a few small projects, and conclude with a substantial project developed as a team.

The atypical aspects of this particular effort include explicit nontechnical initial classes, alternating lecture days with “deepening” days (for reflection and experimentation), the use of BlueJ at the start instead of the target integrated development environment (VisualAge for Java), a focus on “soft skills” (such as teamwork and presentation), and coaching of trainees as they transition into the workplace environment. The approach also concentrates on concepts over application programming interfaces.

The presentation of the paper is acceptable, but I was surprised to find such errors as a numbered list with items beginning at the number two (apparently a word processor issue). Also, demographics are provided about the trainees, but not about the trainers, including the number of trainers used. Cost is only mentioned indirectly (for example, trainees received full salaries). Also missing from the paper is an assessment of the effectiveness of the training. Perhaps the authors plan to provide an assessment in a future report. Formative assessment should be possible, and may help identify the relative merits of each phase of the training. As a college teacher, I would be interested in knowing which concepts proved most useful to such a training program.