Software Engineering Learning Landscape: an experience report from Siemens Healthineers

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the software engineering activities of Siemens Healthineers that are related to education and learning. Our training activities have a long history and are done globally throughout the company. We expect that experience and lessons learned are useful for others. Our software engineering education activities range from onboarding of new employees to approaches for continuous learning for highly experienced professionals. We start already very early with training the “next generation” software engineers and focus on growing that talent throughout their career. We share here lessons learned that we have made over the past decades on this topic. This industrial experience report describes our approach by focusing on various “dimensions”. The dimensions include the experience level, the content, and the format. Especially due to the Corona situation, we have held many trainings virtually and we share also our insights. Finally, we include three concrete examples of an aspect of our education and learning activities. These are on applying and conveying the agile mindset to learning to attract young talents, virtual hackathons and systematic link between training and job profiles.