Your First Month

August 26th 2019 -

Hello & Welcome

Thank you for joining our team and we're excited to build awesome stuff together that helps Vermonter's lead healthier, happier lives.

You can read about the core of what we do in our Vision & Mission statement on our public website

Here's some of the broad strokes stuff you can expect in the first couple months and beyond. This is based upon the SOV On-boarding and Hiring Guide.

1. Computer Setup

Some software installations may already be present on your computer, but in case they aren't, installing and configuring is a good orientation to the tools we use here on a regular basis

Here are some things to get started with as you setup your machine:

Additional tools you may find useful

2. Introductions

  1. Building Tour - Overview of program areas and conference rooms (especially the hard to find ones)
  2. Brief Intros - Introductions to IT division personnel. Get to know folks around the office and where they sit
  3. Welcome 1 on 1s with available office folks. Schedule about an hour long block with various folks from around the office to do a deep dive, get to know them, and have them share their experiences working here and what programs they work on.

3. Trainings

There are several mandatory health department trainings and many more training and professional development opportunities to explore based on any knowledge gaps in technologies that we're working with

Mandatory Trainings

The following are a list of mandatory trainings that all new hires must take.

Class signup can be done via LINC - Lead. Innovate. Navigate. Connect!.

For more information about LINC please visit : https://humanresources.vermont.gov/training/sov-linc

Development Trainings

This can be setup on a case by case basis. A key training tool we lean on is pluralsight, so we'll get set up with an account and identify trainings that should help bridge any experiences with things you're familiar with to things that we're working on here.

4. Anticipated Work

  1. Sprint Work

    Primary work assignments typically come from a SCRUM team identifying work, planning it during sprint planning, and is generally the prioritized over other background work.

    As you get acclimated to the systems we're maintaining, you can take on more of the estimating, planning, and implementations. To start, most work will probably be guided with the help of a senior developer, but minimally you should be prepared to sit in and shadow all dev work being done to become familiar with those systems

  2. Individual Work

    It's important to find some stuff that you can work on unilaterally that doesn't require coordinating multiple team resources. This provides good fall-back work with much less of the dependency pressures of delivering stuff within a sprint

    Lots of the stuff we can work on independently typically involves some tech debt style work, like migrating to newer systems, updating versions, adding to our documentation, or other various enhancements to our processes.

  3. Trainings

    Trainings can always occupy any remaining down time or also be pro-actively used to orient to any new technologies or frameworks.

Admin Stuff (Pre-Work)

Note: Prior to the first day, supervisors should do the following stuff: