Continuously Improving Apache Flink Training

Apache Flink General | Company Updates

10 February 2022 by David Anderson

Apache Flink is one of the fastest-evolving open source projects, so we’re continuously improving our Apache Flink training courses to keep pace. There are usually three significant Apache Flink updates a year, and we have to keep the following four, in-depth training courses up to date:

Apache Flink Developer Training - a comprehensive introduction to Flink development
Advanced Apache Flink Development & Troubleshooting - a deep dive into Apache Flink runtime and operations
Self-guided Training Materials - online training materials for independent learners
Bespoke Apache Flink Training Courses - custom courses held for entire development teams

Since we work alongside many of Flink’s core developers here, we’re able to update our Flink training courses within a few weeks of new Apache Flink releases.

In addition to recently updating our courses for the Flink 1.14 release, we also modified our course structure and content in order to improve the remote training experience for students and instructors. With so much of peoples’ time now spent in online meetings due to COVID-related remote employment trends, we’ve made an effort to reduce “Zoom Fatigue.”

christopher-gower-m_HRfLhgABo-unsplash ;Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Reducing “Zoom Fatigue” in On-line Training

Flink is a large and complex piece of software, and there’s a lot of information to take in during our courses. Our challenge was to reduce the length of online lectures, to reduce fatigue, and still impart all the important learnings Flink training students require.

Instructor-led Hard Stuff, Self-guided Easy Stuff

The big change we made was to mix instructor-led online sessions with new, self-guided training lessons to be done between lecture sessions.

Instructor-led sessions -These cover core concepts and the most frequently misunderstood parts of Flink to make sure trainees are able to climb the steepest parts of the Flink learning curve.

Self-guided lessons - These include additional reading and exercises to be done between classes. The lessons cover simpler Flink concepts and API usage, as well as reinforcing best practices learned in lectures.

The new structure has enabled us to reduce the time trainees spend in lectures by 33% — and still ensure trainees are able to productively build Flink applications on their own by the end of training.

We’ve seen that shortening the lectures while pushing details out into self-paced reading and exercises is making it easier for trainees to see the forest for the trees. The new structure is also leading to livelier online sessions with trainees coming back refreshed and interested in discussing their learnings from the self-paced materials.

We hope to see you in class!

To learn more about our Apache Flink training course content and to register, click through the links below for our upcoming training classes. If you develop training courses, we hope the experience we’ve shared here helps, and we’d love to hear some of your training course development practices — let us know what you think.