TechMap - we've launched!

TechMap Intro

TechMap is a light-touch, part-time training programme to increase your confidence to a level where you can forge meaningful connections with technical people: hiring partners, candidates, engineers, support staff, you name it.

What you'll get out of TechMap.

The basic models of technology that all technical people share: a strong, confident basis from which you can specialise with your own research or by speaking to technologists.

It's easy to assume technical people just "work differently". But really, their behaviours are shaped by a simple set of models about how the technical world works.

🌎 A Shared Basic Worldview

We want you to have the basic shared view of the world that they have: to understand what they're talking about, and the sorts of problems they're facing.

If you share the same basic worldview, then you can talk to each other as equals and you can learn from each other.

You don't need to be super-technical, learn to code, or to get a qualification to get this worldview. You just need to master some 🧩 simple models and frameworks.

Applied 🧩 Models ⇒

                             Shared ****🌎 **Worldview** ⇒

                                                             Confident ****🧠 **Intuition** + ****Better ****💬 **Discussions**

Here are some examples of what you'll be able to do after this training:

1. Use your judgement with technical stakeholders. If a hiring manager says they want a React engineer, then you'll know that your Angular candidate might also be a good fit for the role.
2. When you're pitching a role to candidates, you'll be able to discuss the sorts of things that the employer's team is working on.
3. You'll be familiar with "hot" terms like CI/CD, source control, and test automation, and you'll understand how these things actually solve the sorts of problems that your clients face.
4. You'll be able to answer the following questions: What is technology? What is software? What's code? What's a programming language and how is that different to a framework? When we talk about React, Python, Data Engineering, or JavaScript, what are we really talking about?

This program will give you a grounding in the basic models that all technical people share. It's a strong, confident basis from which you can specialise with your own research or by speaking to technologists.

Here's what you'll learn.

1. What technology is: The Web Stack, Hardware & Software, Programming Languages.
2. Who makes tech: Software roles, Data, DevOps, Designers, and so on.
3. How tech is made: How all these roles work together to ship product.
4. Modern practices: Agile, Deployment, Microservices, Cloud.

This programme is all about acquiring the basic models of technology. These models click together like a jigsaw 🧩 to give you the "lay of the land".

The three fundamental models are basically the "What", the "Who", and the "Why" of tech. Then we build on top of it looking at Modern Practices and the Cloud.

💻 The What: Code, and the Web Stack

First we introduce the most important fundamental technical model: the web stack. Here we cover:

1. The client
2. The server
3. The database

Just knowing this basic model will give you a lot of power in having discussions, because this is a model that technical people assume everyone knows since almost all technical work touches the web in some way.

You'll be able to answer:

• What is code?
• What is a programming language? What makes JavaScript different to Python?
• Why do some people use React, and others use Ruby on Rails?

👩🏾‍💻 The Who: Job roles

There are so many job titles. These are different from company to company, and seemingly, from week to week. Job Descriptions are usually stuffed with really specific jargon that's not a direct match to your candidate pool.

You'll get lots of practice using a nice, simple four-role-family model. You'll understand what each role family cares about, and how they work together to achieve their goals:

• ✨ Application Engineering build features.
• 🔧 DevOps make sure everything works in reality.
• 🧠 Data provide insights to the business.
• 🛡️ Cyber Security avert damage from attacks.

Almost all technical engineering work can be understood in terms of one of these four role families. These families contain all sorts of specific roles:

• ✨ Frontend/Backend Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer, Product Engineer.
• 🔧 Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps Engineer, SDET, Azure specialist.
• 🧠 Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Data visualisation specialist, BI developer.
• 🛡️ InfoSec Analyst, Penetration Tester, Security Consultant.

We explain how these role families have emerged over the years: understanding the past will help us understand the present, and anticipate role growth in the future.

We practice this section with job descriptions. How much could you pitch one kind of role for another role? Where are the boundaries? When could you pitch a data engineer for a data scientist job?

And if you want to specialise, you can deep-dive into recorded, transcribed interviews with senior practitioners in the field so you can really understand what it is that makes them tick.

🔁 The How: Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

How do these people all work together to ship technical products? Everyone's got an app idea, but how do you actually take an app idea into reality?

Here we analyse the workflow of real technical teams using another fundamental technical model: the software development life cycle.

You'll learn how designers work with developers to engineer systems, what sorts of problems they might come across as they do. You'll learn how Application Engineers and DevOps work to ship working software to users in the real world, what it actually means to have something running in the real world and who fixes it when it goes wrong.

🚀 Modern practices

TechMap is always up-to-date with the latest practices and technologies. "Modern Practices" brings the three fundamental tech models together to address the newest technical trends.

We start with Agile and Kanban: how work is created and allocated inside tech companies.

We'll then look at CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery). This is a huge topic at the moment, which touches all parts of tech companies and nearly every role. At its heart, CI/CD is a set of tools and techniques to help tech teams deliver working software continuously: many times a day. Making changes many times a day is top of mind for modern tech executives.

As part of CI/CD, we'll look at Source Control, MicroServices, and the Cloud.

You'll be able to answer:

• 🔧 Why is this company expanding roles in DevOps?
• 📜 What's the difference between AWS qualification tiers?
• 👷🏾‍♀️ How can my work help this engineering manager hit their key targets?

☑️ Recap By this point, you'll know:

1. What tech is.
2. Who makes it.
3. How they all work together to get it into the hands of customers.
4. How technology actually gets built today.

You've got a top-to-bottom understanding of how any tech-enabled company works.

In short.

This programme is about developing a 🌎 shared basic worldview of technology through practicing the 🧩 key models and frameworks that make up the "lay of the land". It's about developing your 🧠 intuition so you can use this knowledge in 💬 discussion, not just having a list of useless information that you might learn from a classroom.

To that end, everything is delivered in short, bite-sized targeted sessions with lots of hands-on applied practice.

By completing this programme, you'll:

• Know better your area of business, and how it fits into the wider field of tech.
• Understand specific technology like .NET, NodeJS, and Apache: and where these all fit together: and when one can substitute for another.
• Connect meaningfully with tech clients, so if they say things like "oh we're breaking down this monolith into production microservices using AWS Lambda" you'll know what that means for the people that do that work.
• Have meaningful conversations with candidates about their work, enabling you to customise your pitches to them based on what they're actually interested in.
• Feel a little bit less out of your depth, and a little bit more powerful in that sense.

Don't just take our word for this: try it by booking a demo