Start your journey to becoming a software Craftsman today. Place yourself on a long-term track to jump-start your career, avoid expensive schooling, and gain hands-on experience, all while learning from the industry's best.
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Launch your career in software development
Hands-on training and mentorship
Get paid while learning and honing your craft
The Craftsmanship Academy is a training program designed to nurture junior developers into long-term team members at RoleModel Software. Aimed at those with some programming background, it offers hands-on learning under the mentorship of experienced developers, called "Craftsmen," through real-world projects. The mentorship model of the Academy gives participants the chance to work on real-world projects under the direct coaching and supervision of the industry’s best developers, our ‘Craftsmen’.
With a focus on building internal talent, the Academy accepts up to five participants yearly, providing a solid foundation in Software Craftsmanship principles. The goal is to grow skilled Craftsmen, as demonstrated by Academy alumni who have advanced to key roles within RoleModel.
As part of RoleModel's culture, our foundation is on growing people and seeing them provide value for our customers. This starts with the Craftsmanship Academy.
A Craftsman is an Expert in his field. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition details the progression of Novice to Expert in a set of skills, but it has been demonstrated that many people never get past the Advanced Beginner (or “unconscious incompetence”) stage. They do not recognize important context in a problem space. They do not sense that acquiring or applying a certain skill (or skillset) would modify their approach to problem-solving, and they deny the value of those skills. These are the sort of people you might describe as "having had one year of experience five times."
Our approach is to expose participants to themes, concepts, and skills through teaching and examples. Then, we help them establish their ability to recognize and apply what they are learning through repeated application in increasingly complicated contexts. Many of the skills we concentrate on are not taught (or at least not emphasized or put in their proper perspective) in colleges or other boot camps.
The Craftsmanship Academy offers an alternative path to launching a career in software development through a hands-on, apprenticeship-based model. The academy emphasizes ultralearning alongside industry experts to provide a practical foundation in software development, preparing participants to contribute immediately to high-performance teams.
Unlike a traditional 4-year degree, the Academy accelerates career growth by immersing participants in real projects with mentorship and active feedback. The Academy's focus on internal talent development aims to cultivate long-term, skilled developers for RoleModel’s team. To learn more about Ultralearning in the context of the Academy, check out our 4-part blog series comparing our approach to traditional academia.
With our summer 2024 we followed their journey through regular interview from participants on how they progressed and what they learned along the way along with a wrapup at the end of the Immersion Phase. Check out playlist below.
RoleModel Software is a custom software development shop dedicated to delivering high-quality software to its customers while cultivating a work environment where community, learning, mentoring, apprenticeship, and growth can flourish. Since 1997, we have been industry leaders in agile development, pushing the envelope on software craftsmanship and inspiring others to do the same. Our passion for promoting quality in work and in life is what compelled us to start the RoleModel Software Craftsmanship Academy. Learn more about our culture here.
The program begins late spring with the next cohort slated for Summer 2025 and will follow the rough schedule below:
Residency Phase: Quarterly evaluations continue as long as the participant shows progress and until they reach the Developer I level, at which point they are eligible to participate in profit sharing.
Finding talent is a huge problem for the software industry. And the common solution to that problem doesn’t work very well.
Many in the industry want to mine talent. When one mines, one looks for a resource-rich place and starts digging. That doesn’t work very well when it comes to developers because the best talent is in places that:
appreciate what they have, and
can afford to pay them reasonably well.
There’s a better, less popular method: Farming for talent.
We recognized that universities and boot camps were not producing people with a solid foundation. For that reason, we decided an apprenticeship model to grow Software Craftsmen was the way to go. It took time, but we found that by intensely nurturing those who had already learned the basics and desired to build software well, we could produce really solid developers in 12–24 months.
We started slow — an apprentice or two at a time. We were careful to find good seed — people with an aptitude for software development and an attitude to match their desire to grow. The best seed are those who had already taken some initiative in their own learning, recognized they had a lot more to learn, sought to serve others through software development, and showed willingness to work hard to become a Software Craftsman.
We recognized that the best seed needed a whole lot of initial attention, then more attention, then nurturing. We eventually came to group these into three phases:
Immersion (giving a Novice a good foundation so they could begin the path to becoming a Competent software developer without a lot of stumbling blocks),
Apprenticeship (getting them from Advanced Beginner to basic Competence) and
Residency (watching for places that Competence hadn’t yet taken root).
The Craftsmanship Academy does not focus on teaching programming basics; instead, it emphasizes crafting high-quality software. Candidates need a solid grasp of programming fundamentals and problem-solving skills to succeed in the program. To ensure this, all serious applicants complete a live, interactive programming assessment, which evaluates not only correct answers but also problem-solving approaches. RoleModel's experience shows that the Academy provides a stronger foundation than typical computer science programs or bootcamps. The program aims to develop well-rounded software developers, which can't be reliably achieved through brief bootcamps alone.
We're actively seeking participants for our next cohort who are willing to study initially at our headquarters in Apex, NC. Ultimately, our goal is to turn our Academy graduates into influential members of the RoleModel team working at one of our locations in: Apex, NC or Menomonie, WI
