The customer service reps at Holiday Extras spend their days talking to customers on the phone. Andy Britcliffe, CTO of Holiday Extras, had a wild thought: what if we had an engineering apprenticeship program that enabled these reps to learn the other side of the business?

On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, Andy talks to Peter about the success of the internship and apprenticeship programs at Holiday Extras. He discusses why education programs for employees lead to better retention and higher engagement. Listen in for Andy’s tips on how to start a program like this at your company.

[00:46] - Holiday Extras
[01:44] - Learning to be a tech leader
[03:38] - Apprenticeship scheme
[08:24] - Preparation and infrastructure
[09:24] - Sandwich year
[10:48] - Matrix management structure
[11:57] - Dev coaches
[15:28] - Foundations teams
[19:53] - Team rotation
[22:19] - Pod composition
[23:17] - Optional participation
[25:08] - Distributed nearshoring teams

This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse.io. Clubhouse lets you manage software projects with the perfect balance of simplicity and structure, so you and your team can be happier, less stressed, and hyper-focused on building products that customers love. It’s free for up to 10 users, plus you can get two free months on any paid plan at https://clubhouse.io/CTO.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.

Engineering Apprenticeships and Ongoing Education with Andy Britcliffe