Academy Instructor (or Academy Lead)

Rationale

This document explains the role of an Academy Instructor, or Academy Lead. The latter term was widely used from 2016 — 2020 but now with the Lead Academy Instructor role in place and wider adoption of the term instructor it makes sense to use the former. This guide sets out what is expected of you when performing the Academy Instructor role.

What is the Neil Jennings Academy?

If you would like to find out more about this programme, you can read about it here.

What is an Academy Instructor?

The Academy Instructor is a key role in the Neil Jennings Academy full-stack engineering programme. Academy Instructors work closely with the permanent Academy team (the Lead Academy Instructor, the Academy Manager, and the Director of Academy) to deliver the programme effectively, and to continue to enhance and improve the programme with each iteration. It's a critical role with a lot of responsibility (given you're training our future consultants!), but it's also highly rewarding and will give you the chance to build a really valuable skill set.

It's worth noting that the reasoning behind not making all the Academy Instructor roles permanent is twofold. Firstly, rotating the Academy Instructors regularly means the Academy programme can continue to draw on the experience and expertise of people who are hands-on in engineering consultancy roles day-to-day, and who are right up-to-date in terms of their skills and knowledge. Secondly, taking on the Academy Instructor role is an incredibly valuable opportunity, as explained in detail here. The temporary nature of the Academy Instructor role means we can offer this opportunity to many more consultants at Infinity Works who are wanting to try out something new and different, and which will allow them to build a really valuable set of skills that are so important to consultancy too.

This role is usually carried out by those at career level CL9 Consultant and above.

What are the responsibilities of the Academy Instructor?

• Deliver the existing Academy programme, following the curriculum and using the course materials that have been previously created.
• Participate in enhancing the programme further. Academy Instructors should look to bring ideas and knowledge to the Academy programme from their client accounts, as well as drawing from their personal experiences to continually improve the programme. This ensures the Academy programme and curriculum stay as fresh and up-to-date as possible.
• Work with speakers from within the business to cover a variety of topics from the training schedule. These topics could include specialist talks on Agile, testing, cloud development and data engineering — the list goes on!
• Work with the Academy team on the wider curriculum to ensure it's delivering a great all-round experience for the Academites.
• Run a mixture of classroom training lessons, retros, talks, practical programming exercises and workshops, and various other sessions, as required.
• Supervise and support as the cohort put their learnings into practice by working with them individually and in pairs/groups as needed.
• Ensure everyone is working to the timetable to stay on track.
• Assess and monitor progress of the Academites throughout the programme.
• Support with client placements by providing input into which Academite goes where.
• Come up with a 6-week final project for the programme, in collaboration with the Academy team.

This project aims to give the Academites experience of working in a team in an Infinity Works way, allowing them to apply their learning to build a software product. For each Academy programme, we choose a fictitious business context for an otherwise realistic software application, which then allows us to simulate a typical client delivery project but without the real client pressure. This gives the Academy cohort a chance to apply the skills they've been taught and build towards an end-of-Academy launch event. Some previous examples of what's been created include an Archery scoring application, Infiniopoly, InfiniPie Works, and InfiniPets.

ISO

You'll carry out your role in accordance with the requirements of ISO9001 and ISO27001 as reflected in the Company's policies and procedures and the ISO9001 and ISO27001 organisational structure charts.