LinkedIn Women In Tech (WIT) High School Trainee Program
Introducing Our High School Trainee Program
LinkedIn is proud to present the open source version of our High School Trainee program. The High School Trainee program was born out of the Women in Tech (WIT) initiative at LinkedIn, and was started in 2015 by Sarah Clatterbuck and the Community Task Force within Women in Tech at LinkedIn. The vision of the Community Task Force was to "Inspire the next generation to study computer science and related fields." Today, High School Trainee exists as its own task force within the Women in Tech initiative with the same vision.
The program focuses on embedding students in a software engineering team for seven to eight weeks. While students learn important technical skills from their mentors, the main objective of the program is for students to develop identities as software engineers and be able to concretely see themselves thriving in the technology industry in the future. This identity forms the foundation from which they will seek to continue studies in computer science or related STEM fields. To date, 100% of High School Trainee graduates have gone on to study STEM and 15 of 16 students have gone on to study computer science in particular.
This open source project is the outcome of the third year of the program. As LinkedIn has run two prior pilots and prepares to embark upon a third cohort, this body of work represents learnings to date. The goal of the open source project is to inspire and equip other companies to expand the program to provide additional opportunities for students in Silicon Valley and beyond. The desire for access to the program far exceeds the capacity a single corporation can provide. LinkedIn receives thousands of emails and messages from interested students each year, yet can only support a program for tens of students.
Program Materials
The Program Materials will guide an outline for how a company can operationalize such a program. Program materials include an annual schedule for planning and executing a High School Trainee program, sample materials for trainee and mentor evaluations, sample materials for trainee events and a program overview and philosophy.
Technical Bootcamp Curriculum
LinkedIn’s Women In Tech is proud to present the new streamlined high school trainee bootcamp curriculum. The Technical Bootcamp Curriculum provides content by which mentors and students can engage through the duration of the program for technical learning. This bootcamp lasts for seven weeks (with an optional eighth week), and will introduce front-end and back-end development through development of a full-stack Web application.
Mentor Expectations
Mentors should review lectures, labs, and lab solutions beforehand in order to effectively help the trainees with any questions they may have. Mentors can decide if they would like for their trainees to use the Git project to see lab directions and lab solutions, or if they want to withhold the lab solutions and only share the lab directions. It is expected that mentors will dedicate approximately four hours per day, during the duration of the program, to working with the trainees.
What's in the Git Repo
Commands Cheat Sheet
Commands_Cheat_Sheet.docx contains basic UNIX, SVN, and Git commands. These commands are covered in the Terminal lecture and the optional Git/SVN lecture (pick the relevant slides based on what you use). You may want to consider printing out copies for the trainees to keep.
Lesson Plan
Lesson_Plan.docx has a high-level overview of each week’s topics. The rest of the folders in the repo are each week’s lesson material. In each week’s folder, lesson materials are broken down by days. Each day will have a corresponding lecture, lab, and lab solution. The filename convention is weekNumber.dayNumbertopictitle.pptx
Bootcamp Structure
This bootcamp is designed with the expectation that trainees will be available for four days each week for seven to eight weeks. Each day is eight hours long, with the expectation that one hour is for lecture and up to three hours are for lab. The remaining time in each day is for the trainees to spend working with their mentor on company source code features and bugs.
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