The first six months of training under different conditions (Part 1)
Our start into a new phase of life, and for many the first step into professional life, could begin as planned on 01.08.2020. How has Corona influenced us since then? What have we experienced at Sycor up to this point? What do our apprentice colleagues from the 1st year of the apprenticeship have to say about it? We share our experience here as future application developers for Microsoft Dynamics.
The start of a new phase in life
The acclimatisation phase at Sycor went very quickly. After our first three days, in which we were taught everything important and general about the company's processes, we went straight to our department. Due to Corona, the offices were emptier at that time and we could only get to know a handful of people for the time being.
Of course, at the beginning of a new phase of life, you always have fears or an uneasy feeling, but we were welcomed by everyone in a very friendly way and we immediately noticed a good working relationship, which meant that all the insecurities disappeared very quickly.
Eaven at the Sycor central office in Göttingen.
Our time in the office
Due to the Corona measures, our apprentice office was already fully occupied with both of us and our apprentice colleagues from the 3rd apprenticeship year therefore continued to work from the home office so that we could not get to know them for the time being.
Our first task was to set up a virtual machine for our training project. After that, we were allowed to start directly with our first exercise project. Our first exercise project consists of developing certain areas for a car rental company in D365 (ERP solution from Microsoft). The first tasks of the project slowly introduced us to the interface in the Visual Studio development environment. At first, we didn't do any programming, but only created initial tables and the like. Then, little by little, we carried out small programming tasks. Our first programme snippets had an immediate effect, as we were able to see our changes in the test system at the same time. It felt like a complete success and we were able to have fun and reach many small milestones in the first three months.
The move to the home office
After that we went to the home office. Unfortunately, the Corona numbers rose sharply again and we could no longer work on site (as usual). The first phase of the home office was the hardest. The familiar working environment on site was gone as quickly as it had come - no more lunch together, no more meeting on the way to the coffee machine and no more opportunity to simply talk to each other in person. But of course we are not only talking about the disadvantages of the home office.
In terms of the two of us, we save about 90-120 minutes commuting to work, which is more than 40 hours of commuting time per month. We are also spared an expensive train ticket. We had no problem switching to the home office due to our practice tasks and were able to pick up directly where we left off in the office. Later, we interrupted our training project in the home office and started with exercises in C# to understand the basics of programming. For this, our trainer developed a small first programme with us to learn many basics. After that, we were allowed to work on our own and program a calculator. With this, we were able to teach ourselves a lot. The change back to the training project is coming up and we are looking forward to implementing everything we have learned in programming. Many thanks to all who have accompanied us on this journey so far!
Next week you'll hear more from us and our first six months of training here at Sycor. You can look forward to exciting surveys on the topic of internal training from the home office and homelearning.
Our authors have very different professions and come from different areas and locations of Sycor. All of them write from their personal point of view and from their personal experiences.
Eaven Schmalz & Christopher Nolte
IT specialist for application development