The Perks of Hiring and Growing Junior Developers

Companies can sometimes be hesitant to hire junior developers over senior developers. After all, if you can afford to hire a senior developer, why take the risk to hire someone who is less experienced, requires training, and is potentially more prone to errors?

However, contrary to these fears, there are actually several financial and cultural benefits to hiring junior developers and growing them within your company via upskilling, mentoring, and other programs.

What are the perks of going this route? And how can you grow your junior talent into senior talent within your organization?

Let’s dive in.

The Perks of Hiring Junior vs. Senior Talent

1. Finding good people is hard, but developing talent is within your control.

We already know that STEM talent is scarce. Instead of making your developer search even more difficult by only accepting the cream of the crop, why not find someone with the basic skills you need and then grow them in-house? Even experienced developers will have a learning curve with your company’s culture, tools, and strategies; hiring junior developers will give you the chance to discover and grow talent in your company’s image.

2. You can create job growth opportunities.

Many employees today—especially millennials—prioritize career progression over salary advancement and other common workplace perks. Hiring someone at the junior level with the promise that you will grow their skills and expertise on the job is a huge benefit; you’ll not only attract talent, but retain it as your company gains a reputation for investing in your employees’ careers.

3. Your existing developers will benefit from mentorship opportunities.

Hiring junior developers gives your senior developers an opportunity to share their expertise as they work alongside the new hires. Your junior developers will learn your company’s specific development ins and outs while senior developers will improve their leadership and communication skills, which will prepare them for management roles. It’s a win-win.

4. They bring passion and fresh ideas into your company.

Bringing new developers on board will provide your company with a fresh crop of new ideas. Coding best practices change quickly, and junior developers may bring new ways of thinking and problem solving to the table. Plus, junior developers are excited to be entering the field and testing out their skills for the first time, and their passion often helps reignite others’ enthusiasm for old projects.

5. You’ll free up senior developers to focus on higher-order tasks.

Junior developers need practice in routine and basic coding. Your talent budget is better spent paying less experienced employees to finish tasks that might seem mundane to senior developers. In turn, the senior developers can lend their expertise to bigger-picture issues such as suggesting improvements and solving difficult problems.

Growing Developers From the Junior to Senior Level

Developers move from junior to senior levels by gaining years of work experience, scope of responsibilities, and level of expertise. However, as a company, you can fast-track your developers’ careers (and consequently make them more valuable to your organization) in a couple of key ways:

Mentoring

As discussed above, mentorship programs within your organization benefit developers at all levels. Junior developers will learn not only hard skills from your more senior team members, but also the soft skills they need to succeed in your company’s culture. In addition, your senior developers will benefit from answering less experienced employees’ questions, which will invite them to revisit concepts they may not have paused to think about for years or even learn new methodologies themselves.

Upskilling

Upskilling is when companies offer training programs and continuous learning opportunities to help employees develop new abilities and close the skills gap in your workforce. Upskilling allows you to promote from within your organization and invest in your junior developers to mold them into the senior developers of your dreams.

What’s more, upskilling programs provide organization-wide perks to both you and your employees. One study by IBM found that there’s a positive correlation between the performance of a company and their employees receiving the training they need. In addition, businesses enjoy an average 10% increase in productivity and $70,000 in annual savings when teams are appropriately trained.

Upskilling the Next Generation of Coders

In addition to providing excellent products and services, most companies want to leave a positive mark on the world. Our economy is in desperate need of developers, and by taking a chance on new developers and training them up in the industry, companies are not only fulfilling their talent needs, but also contributing to the country’s economic future and growth.

But companies don’t have to take on the responsibility of training and upskilling on their own. At The Software Guild, we work hand in hand with organizations to empower their employees to stay up to date with emerging technologies, provide them with the skills they need to build excellent software, and standardize coding and programming methodologies and best practices company wide. Learn more about how we can partner together today.