Pride’s Apprenticeship Partnership

Our apprenticeship program is designed to solve a multitude of challenges that companies face when investing in custom app development while building long-term relationships that benefit everyone involved. This time around, we are excited to highlight our client, Pride Resources Inc., and their experience of taking on an apprentice to learn their business and help improve efficiency and productivity with their custom apps.

Pride Resources Inc. (Pride) focuses on cooperative equipment and supply purchasing for restaurants (or anyone using commercial kitchen equipment), as well as marketing and networking within the industry. As you can imagine, being the hub for so many different organizations means working with a lot of data. Pride found themselves drowning in spreadsheets and contact lists spread across departments, with no centralization or consistency.

After building a new centralized database to house dealer and vendor information, Pride’s sole technical team member decided it was time to move on. This left Pride in a pinch – they had a database but needed better data workflows and a new team member. The prospect of trying to hire a new resource felt daunting.

“So the challenge is, how do you hire if you’re not a technical person? How do you hire somebody to do that job for you?”

Karin Sugarman, CEO

Demonstrated Program Value

The biggest selling point of our apprenticeship program is how it tackles a recurrent issue for its participating organizations. In fact, Pride’s CEO, Karin Sugarman, perfectly captured this critical challenge, “So the challenge is, how do you hire someone if you’re not a technical person?” When organizations have limited or no in-house technical resources, it can be difficult to assess skills and fit on top of providing necessary support. For Pride, our apprenticeship program delivered a much-needed solution.

Try Before You Buy

For smaller companies like Pride, that have fewer than 50 employees, many common hiring challenges are compounded. As a tight team with few redundancies, skill assessment can prove to be especially tricky. When you aren’t the expert, it’s easy to miss important qualifications and focus on the wrong things. 

When working with our sponsoring clients, Codence is able to pre-screen potential candidates based on the needs and goals of the company. Potential candidates are then interviewed by the client to assess internal fit, making the process smoother and easier from the get go. 

“It was definitely a much easier way than us trying to find somebody and engage based on what we don’t know.”

Karin Sugarman, CEO

Once an ideal candidate has been identified, the value of this arrangement is further highlighted as both the apprentice and company are given the opportunity to learn about each other during the 12-week program. The candidate comes in with an offer from the sponsoring company, but the program span gives both parties the chance to ensure it’s a good fit. For Pride, it was an easy choice, one that Sugarman describes as a “seamless integration.”

Efficient Software Development

For Pride, it was beneficial having their apprentice, Alex, participate in the Codence-led project while “interning and learning.” He was able to shadow the programmers to understand how things were built and why. While he learned the ropes, PRI took some time to learn about and populate their new database. 

Having a dedicated internal resource who could interpret the original project scope and requirements was helpful, and overtime Alex was able to start making his own contributions. Now Pride is ready to come out of “maintenance mode” and move on to Phase 2. After showing significant growth, Alex will be leading the project internally after successfully presenting to the board of directors. “He did a great job,” Sugarman remarked.

Fostering Long-Term Relationships

One of the core objectives of our apprenticeship program is to build strong, long-term relationships with the apprentices and the sponsoring companies alike. As Pride prepares for the next phase of development, led internally by Alex, Codence is preparing to join the project to help work through the more complex security and web requirements.

Meanwhile, Alex will continue to learn while guiding and managing the project and Codence gets to serve a client while also supporting our program graduate, setting everyone up for success.

Next Generation of Claris FileMaker Developers

Another key goal for the apprenticeship program is to expand the Claris FileMaker development community. We love being able to bring new faces into the community and grow the skill sets for non-traditional and/or underrepresented students. For Pride, Alex was a great example of the benefits of a non-traditional entry point into programming and Claris FileMaker development.

Sugarman shared, “[…]the part we love about Alex is that this was not his first choice of career – he started in economics, with some business background as well.” Pride benefited from Alex’s pre-existing skills by leveraging his understanding of data from a more business-oriented standpoint.

By being able to look beyond a set scope of skills and focusing on what opportunities an apprentice can unlock, sponsoring clients can build teams based on best fit and work hand-in-hand with Codence to nurture the needed skills. Now, after the conclusion of Alex’s apprenticeship, Pride is delighted with their new team member, telling us, “[…]Codence found a really dynamic young man who was just very young […]it worked out really well for us.”

Codence is excited to replicate PRI’s success and nurture more students through our apprenticeship program while building long-term, meaningful relationships with our clients. We look forward to many more opportunities to help our clients build up their teams to get the most out of their Claris FileMaker custom development investments.

Ready to sponsor your own apprentice? Learn more about our FileMaker Apprenticeship Program here.