Retraining hardware engineers

After a major reorganisation of Fulcrum Communications, there was a surplus of hardware engineers. These people were considered too important to lose because of their project management skills. Hardware engineering often requires elements of programming. Due to the shortage of software engineers, the decision was taken to move some of the hardware engineers into software engineering. They were given two in-house C courses and put to work. It soon became apparent that these people were having difficulty in designing software because they were not familiar with the fundamentals of programming. A requirement for some programming training (rather than language training) was identified.<>