New ask Hacker News story: To what use would you put mature-age beginner programmers?

To what use would you put mature-age beginner programmers?
4 by solresol | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I'm teaching a 10-week, 4-hour-per-week Python programming class at the moment, and the target audience is mature-age career changers. At the end of the course, there is a state-sponsored "apprenticeship" program where most (but not quite all) of the students' salaries will be paid for 6 months; after which the employer can choose to keep them on or not as they want. If you were a potential employer, what would you hire them to do, and what skills would you want from them? My thoughts so far: - I think it's necessary for students to understand ticketing (e.g. Jira) and how to commit code to git, what branches are and so on. I can't imagine a job where this isn't a required job skill. - An option: I can include Selenium in the course, so they could be employed in QA/test. - Or, maybe I could teach them about the imortance of unit tests and the like; then they could be employed writing all those tests that you code-base doesn't have, but should have. - Should I double down on (for example) Django? - I won't have time to do a full machine learning course, but I could teach pandas and guide students towards data analytics roles in the sorts of organisations that do data analytics in Python (rather than Tableau or other BI tools). What would help your job hiring pipeline?

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