Educating non-programmers to flexible, communicative software engineers in a 10 month training program

Financial services companies which heavily depend on IT, still face a shortage of well-educated software engineers. Of the two principal ways to react to this, either by training employees who are already IT-professionals or by introducing talented and interested nonprogrammers to software engineering, the latter was chosen by a large insurance company in Hamburg, Germany. This experience report points out why and how this approach, realized as a trainee program with a well-balanced mix of both technical and soft skills, could be as successful as it eventually turned out to be.