I'm a Software Developer with experience of more than 1.5 years. After being happy with my performance, the CTO of my company made me a team lead of 3 new employees (2 of them graduated recently).
There's an employee, the recent grad (Let's call him John). John knows only basic Java and nothing else. Now, I am mentoring them in a front-end project made up of Angular. But he doesn't even know the basics of HTML and CSS. I told him to study these subjects at home from Codeacademy in the weekend/holidays. But he didn't do it.
Now, whenever I assign them some work, the other two employees do the work with ease, but John struggles even in setting margins and paddings. His main problem is that he doesn't do the work in a logical way but always try some random permutations and combinations in order to make his flukes as a successful attempt to do the work. I have to spoon feed him for every little task. This led to the constant delay of the project which has been assigned to my team from the CTO. And due to this delay, my CTO has been scolding me from last few days mercilessly.
I didn't say anything to CTO but I talked to John once and told him that you need to study the basics of these simple subjects or you won't be able to work in Angular. I even told him to google about a concept which he doesn't know but he isn't good at even searching on google.
Now, due to increasing pressure and scolding from my CTO, I am thinking that the only solution I'm left with is to tell the CTO about him and his habits of doing work with guesstimates so that he can decide whether John is ready to work or not.
So, I want to ask if this would be a good solution to deal with this issue or is there something else which I can further do to cope up with this solution?
Edit : To all those great guys, who are blaming me in the comments and answers right there, I want to let them know that I had given each of those 3 subordinates a simple HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Angular task before starting the project, which each of them were able to complete successfully. It's not like I simply threw the project at them and told them to do this and that in a hurry. This is my first time experience of leading a team. Also, the power is not in my hands to simple allocate them the training task or actual project task. I do what my CTO told me to do and whenever I have taken a decision to provide training to them on my own, then the CTO tells me everytime, "learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript is not something for which they have to devote months. Teach them the basics in 4 hours and give them a day to do a simple task and then they will be all ready for the project. Rest they will learn while doing the project. We don't have so much time to devote on their training."
Now the irony here is that my company hires the employees just on the basis of their aptitude test and with an extremely easy programming test. They tell the freshers that you will be provided with 6 months training. But in actual, this training goes for no more than 1 week.