Learning Strategy Design

Learning is not compulsory ... neither is survival. - W Edwards Deming

A culture of learning comes from intention and purpose.  When executed well is a part of day-to-day efforts and culture. It is a means to an end to support delivery, innovation, collaboration and professional growth.  

This is my design:

Learning is aligned with people and organizational strategy

• Career development

• Learning in Our Flow

Career Development

• Career Coaching

  • Open ended questions

  • Where do you see yourself at the apex of your career?

  • What industry? What size of company?

  • If you could do anything what would it be?

  • Strengths based - VIA Character strengths and Stregthfinders

  • Each person has a career dev plan

  • Discuss their progress during 1:1s

  • The engineers are held accountable through the 1:1 conversations and tracking via Trello board.

  • Action items align around training, role opportunities and networking(this also includes lab week, hackathons, challenges, gig roles, etc

Learning In Our Flow

• Weekly Demos

  • Anything we are working on within our backlog is fair game

  • In-progress preferable to solicit feedback before the work is finished.  

  • Every week to encourage accountability to deliver and share something.  

  • Recorded to encourage continued learning

• Learning Fridays - clear meetings for Friday afternoons to focus on learning, This can be related to the backlog and/or IDP goals. Engineer free to decide how to use this time. 

• Generative Culture - safe to express ideas https://cloud.google.com/architecture/devops/devops-culture-westrum-organizational-culture

  • Psychological safety - focus on supporting and challenging with empathy during meetings.  

  • Supportive team environment - “Yes, and” vs “Yes, but” or “no” don’t shoot down ideas, support ideas, encourage feedback. 

  • No stupid questions

  • Check egos at the door

  • Acknowledge and support the whole person.  Especially through the pandemic, understand each person’s challenges.

  • Don’t isolate information - bring side conversations to standup or the team slack channel.

Processes

• Alignment of learning to backlog and long term strategy - identify gaps and prioritize 

• Workflow process

• Peer reviews required to complete work

• Daily standups foster collaboration and teamwork to achieve our goals

• PRs promote collaboration to review work

•  Architecture Decision Records - Foster collaborative engineering conversations when deciding on new technologies. 

•  Sharing mindset through community

  • All code should be re-usable - make it accessible to the internal community

  • Encourage engineers to participate in communities.  Employee resource groups, tech groups, conferences, etc.  Great opportunity to build relationships.

  • Participate in internal hackathons, if you don’t have any, build one!

  • Build a community.  What technology or professional experience interests you?  Get a group together.  

  • Contribute to being a part of a 10X team, not focusing on being a 10X engineer.

  • Get involved with mentoring opportunities , either as a mentor or a mentee.