10 Minute Read
Doing the inner work
Creating a new pathway for software developers through … camp!
How Jane App took matters into their own hands and developed a program to grow the software development talent pool from the inside out.
Building a team that drives an ambitious forward is no small feat. Today, countless tech companies vie for talent from the same pools; often looking outward to recruit from other areas of the globe. For Jane, the problem wasn’t just about them finding the right ‘who’ for the job – it was something much bigger, enmeshed in a need for diverse perspectives in software development and greater gender diversity in the tech community as a whole.
These key drivers were the jumping-off point for an in-house training program called Jane Camp, designed to provide learning opportunities for those wanting to explore a different path.
An app made for healthcare practitioners, Jane exists to “help the helpers.” Jane App delivers a unified approach to online booking, charting, scheduling, video services and payments so that website visitors become patients. The cloud-based platform was founded in Vancouver Canada.
When Jane came to be, founders Trevor Johnston and Alison Taylor (Ali) blended their two distinct focuses – product and customer – and founded Jane. Now, the two Co-CEOs steer the company towards its vision of making the world a better and healthier place.
But there’s more story to be told.
As with many tech companies, creating a world-class product takes talent. Unfortunately, strong developer talent is what everyone wants – competition among employers can be fierce. For a long time, Ali and Trevor envisioned their company as a source for strong tech talent – not just a beneficiary. Instead of pulling from the same talent pools many of their competitors were tapping into, they saw a way to build a larger and stronger talent pool, invigorated through diverse perspectives. In short, by focusing on what they had. And nurturing change from within. This meant finding a way to help train and create a team from within the ranks, and what better way to do so then to create a … Training Camp.
Statista’s 2021 survey uncovered a stark gender gap: While males account for 91.7% of respondents, female developers amounted to only 5%.
It can be difficult to take an idea and turn it into reality. With time, Jane’s leadership found the impetus and opportunity to support growth in the developer pool from within the organization when Jared Scott, Jane’s VP of Software Engineering, came aboard and was able to (read: passionately) take this project and run with it (and, boy, did he ever). What started as a vision for mentorship soon turned into something far more – that’s what passion, agility and the right support can do.
With Jane Camp, Jane team members are able to build their skills without having to compromise on supporting their loved ones
So what does the program actually look like?
As was always the case from the beginning, Jane Camp was going to be a program that required no financial investment from the participants. Instead, some skin in the game from participants came in the form of time investment outside of work hours at the onset of the program. After all, “they've proven themselves to be a great Jane citizen and this wouldn't be a gift if it meant that they needed to amass a bunch of debt to go through it,” Jared adds.
The Jane Cultivating Developers Program, otherwise known as Jane Camp, is broken into phases that allows Jane employees to explore whether they have both aptitude and interest to jump into a career they haven’t had the chance to try. Supported by the Jane family and the opportunity to try without risk, Camp participants are able to go from having no coding experience to Associate Developers.And here is how the four phases are broken down:
🧑🏽💻 Internship Preparation
Pre-requisites as an employee and to show that you are willing to invest time in return for financial and employer support. Here is where participants explore coding fundamentals over approximately six months.
📚 Education
Once the coding fundamentals course is complete, the next phase launches participants into a well-trusted bootcamp program that’s sponsored entirely by Jane. Over four months, participants dive deep into what’s required to become a stellar developer – all while keeping their current salary.
🙋🏻♀️ Jane Internship
After successfully passing the bootcamp and an assessment interview, Jane Camp participants enter their 12-18 month internship, complete with a mentor, team, real-life working days, and allotted learning time for further development. Here, Jane Camp participants are in the home stretch.
👩🎓 Graduation to Associate Developer
After completing the internship (including coursework and required reading) the interns are no longer interns – they’re promoted to an Associate Developer position, salary and all.
Throughout the entirety of the program, the participants are able to not only keep their job and salary, they have the option to return to their original role if the path to becoming a developer just isn’t right for them
How does this all connect to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion you might ask?
“We'd heard for years that a lot of our support team wanted to become developers and, of course, support is typically very female-heavy,” Ali explains. Ali knew they had people – women in particular – who would love to become developers, it was just a matter of finding answers and solutions to some key questions:
What’s the pathway to get them there?
What are the blockers for women to get into tech?
How could we make underrepresented populations (such as women) feel comfortable when they were not the majority?
How can we leverage different lived experiences, rather than allow these differences to reside in isolation?
Jane’s leadership knew that the benefits from developing developers from within were great – far greater than the costs. “The real problem we're trying to solve is how do we get more women developers into the pool for people who are underrepresented in that pool so that the pool is much more diverse,” Ali says. It’s not just about your company – it’s about the bigger picture that is the tech industry as a whole.
And according to Talent Innovation, companies with a higher degree of diversity were 46% less likely to say ‘ideas at my company rarely make it to market’.
After seeing the power that mentorship had in creating some of the best team members throughout his career, Jared had confidence that the typical university track for software developers wasn’t the only way to go about it if the right support was in place. That combined with their desire to reduce barriers for an otherwise competitive and cost-prohibitive field, Jane Camp was dead set on creating a team as diverse as who you’d see in the grocery store.
“We really want Jane to feel like a safe place for all different Canadians,” Jared shares, “we want a team that is more representative of who you would see if you went to the grocery store – not just the people who were privileged enough to have family support, financial wherewithal, and the agility to jump over the highly competitive hurdles of standard university requirements.
After ruminating on possible solutions, a proposal was birthed in November 2021.
Jane's story is not just increasing diversity in the same way as it's always talked about by merely getting underrepresented groups represented, it's about committing to making pathways for underrepresented groups to expand skills and knowledge in open opportunities that otherwise would have been closed.
“There's actually just a fairness to it, too, … Let's just make sure that people who haven't been given the same opportunities are given some opportunity. We're not starting from the same starting point.”
With over 60% of Jane Camp participants identifying as female, the program is starting off strong and in the direction of its goals. As for the participants?
Monét Fitzgerald-Brian shares her ‘why’: “In recent months I’ve really found a love for troubleshooting and exploring more about the intricacies of how Jane works, so I have been leaning more and more towards the product side. My goal since day 1 has been to build a career here at Jane, and I’ve pushed myself to try as many things as I can to see what I like best. I’ve found I most enjoy the puzzling, problem-solving, and investigative parts of my day, so I’m excited to lean into that and see where it takes me!”
Anouk Borris sees value in the hard work new career moves require: “Jane Camp has been challenging so far, studying after hours quickly makes for busy days, but I am feeling motivated to keep working hard for this opportunity. I know this is our first time running Jane Camp so I am hopeful that the feedback from myself and other participants can be used to build a streamlined, achievable program for future Jane employees!”
Danielle Vallis shares her vision post-program: “I hope to be able to grow my skills enough to succeed as a developer at Jane but also have a well-rounded software development education. I want to see program development and product-focused roles talked about as a career opportunity for people in support roles that show interest.”
As the program continues with its first cohort, Jane’s leadership envisions what’s next: a constant stream of small cohorts that feed a diverse pipeline into the development team, all the while staying open to how the program evolves. Once the program is refined, Jane doesn’t intend to keep things close to the vest. Instead, it’s important that they create something that can be shared with other companies because, really, it’s a much bigger solve than just one company can accomplish.
“The way I see DEI at Jane, the people who are leading that effort have to bring people along every step of that journey, or you get polarization and your message actually gets lost. And so the effort needs to be focused on a functional way to reach your goals, not just a moral stance,” Ali shares.
Jane continues to participate in what we like to call Engaged and Vulnerable action: what started out as a creative, diversity-driven solution turned into a real program that leadership embraced because of the long-term results that would pay dividends beyond the financial investment needed.
Chic Geek’s Diversity Motherboard is here to help you put Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging to practice in your organization! Chic Geek exists to build gender diversity in technology, a sector that’s shaping the world we live in. Our mission is to engage, retain and support intermediate women so they can thrive in their technology careers. Welcome to Chic Geek, your space to thrive!
Jane was created to “help the helpers.” We serve healthcare practitioners by delivering a unified approach to online booking, charting, scheduling, video services, and payments. Trevor Johnston and Alison Taylor, a product person and a customer person, founded Jane and are the Co-CEOs. This means the two primary teams at Jane (the product and the customer team) are led by collaborators who understand the job. There are no suits at Jane. There isn’t even a sales team!
Jane is growing and has an exciting future ahead. We’re working on interesting and challenging projects and we do it all without putting in 60+ hour work weeks. We are a values-driven organization working to make the world a better, healthier place.
This resource is proudly brought to you through funding from Alberta Enterprise Corporation (AEC), which promotes the development of Alberta’s venture capital industry by investing in venture capital funds that financial technology companies. Learn more at alberta-enterprise.ca
Alberta Innovates is a provincial research and innovation agency that expands the horizon of possibilities to solve today’s challenges and create a healthier and more prosperous future for Alberta and the world. Learn more at albertainnovates.ca
