One of the great things I love about working at West Monroe is the spirit of mentorship and camaraderie that are central to our culture. While there are numerous examples, perhaps my up and coming favorite is our New Hire onboarding process. While we have, for many years, made it a priority to put new hires through our Consulting 101 class so they gain an understanding of the world of consulting, we took it to a whole new level last year when, as opposed to hiring an outside firm, we asked internal leaders to develop curriculum to onboard new hires in the various technologies and methodologies that are in use at West Monroe.

Last year, the inaugural year,  I helped lead the mobile portion of this training. Our main focus was iOS with Xamarin as this is where we see most of our client work. The result was impressive, two of those in the class were able to quickly roll on to a crucial Xamarin project and ultimately contributed to a rousing success (one is now leading his own project while the Senior is traveling in China, while the other has become our leading expert on Android).

As I have moved away from mobile to focus on my roots of web and backend development I was asked to put together a new curriculum this year, one focused on cloud computing. This is due to the immense success of the previous year which has seen the time for this training increase to 10 full working days – Cloud will have its own 4hr block.

This desire to mentor and cultivate our young developers into the future leaders is part of what makes working at West Monroe so rewarding. Now starting my 4th year at the firm I have taken great pride in seeing so many of the young consultants I have worked with and mentor now taking leading roles on their projects and continuing to improve.