Developers know that learning is a crucial part of their jobs, especially in this ever-changing tech industry landscape. While you’re reading this, there might be something new that the tech industry has brought to the world. Therefore, working in the tech industry simply means constantly being curious to learn more.
As a tech leader, you want your company to have healthy and proactive employees eager to learn something new and consult where they don’t understand. But as a leader, how will you get your employees into this habit and stay consistent?
Here are five techniques to help drive a continuous learning culture in your developer team.
Set the Example
Being exemplary is one of the most essential parts of promoting a learning culture. Setting an example means guiding others through your behaviour rather than your words. Not only do managers and executives have to emphasise the rationale of learning, but they also demonstrate it through their actions. They can do this by frequently making an effort to learn more. As a leader, get some time off to learn, which could be once or twice a week. Then share what you have learned with your team with your direct reports. If you do this for quite some time, you’ll suddenly see other people doing the same. They’ll be learning, too. They will recognise that this is part of our culture. This is what we do.
Provide the Right Learning Resources
Your team members will certainly only learn something if you provide the right learning resources to them. Learning resources back learning environments. Software development teams usually have curious members eager to learn something new. Therefore, ensure that such talents acquire the right resources to help them scale their skills. If you need to know what resources they need, ask them and try to get them. Whether developing the required cloud skills or reaching a particular level of expertness with the latest programs or software, investing in a learning plan is essential in assisting the team level its skills.
Provide Honest and Encouraging Feedback
Before getting into the learning process, team members need to know their position regarding technical know-how. To improve their skills, they must be aware of their limitations. Give your team members honest, constructive and regular feedback on their performance. Don’t sugar-quote anything; make sure the feedback is specific and actionable. Don’t just speak but mean what you say. Your feedback must be worth a conclusion where you let the team know where the knowledge gap is. This will help them understand what they don’t know.
Set Realistic Goals
Let your team know your expectations for employee performance by setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals. This lets employees know exactly what they’re working towards and how they can best use their time and resources to reach those goals. Also, as senior leaders, you can set expectations by allocating dedicated time for learning. Give employees permission to learn at work and allocate time on their calendars for education. It also erases the expectation that team members must sacrifice their own time to keep up with mastering new tech trends outside of work.
Stress your Team to Join Bootcamps
As a leader, you must always assist your employees in advantageously growing their skills. Remember to underestimate the power of boot camps. If your employees are go-getters, then this would be a great option. Bootcamps are created to assist individuals in gaining skills fairly quickly to either increase competency in specific expertise or transition to a different career. Bootcamps are a practical way to launch someone into an IT career. There’s a slight difference in what the other boot camps teach, but they all focus on the relevant skills needed in the industry today. This relevancy is what makes boot camps a tremendous educational choice when it comes to building a learning culture in your workspace.
Make the Learning Process Interesting
Learning is not an exciting activity for everyone. To ensure the involvement of your team in this activity, make it more engaging by organising some entertaining stuff. Come up with a game with different levels, points and prizes for other learning goals achieved, like the number of books read, tutorials viewed, courses taken, or classes completed. Also, encourage your team members always to share what they recently learnt. This engaging learning process can result in high-yielding knowledge-sharing sessions where employees get new updates they’d have missed.
Conclusion
Creating a learning culture in your work involves providing the right learning resources, setting an example or setting realistic goals. Take the approaches mentioned above, and you will foster a more positive and productive environment within your company. In addition, with the right system, you’ll be able to foster a learning culture that encourages employees to grow and develop their skills. This will help employees become more successful in their current roles and potentially open up new job opportunities as they expand their skill set. Fostering a learning culture can benefit everyone within your organisation—from employees to customers—and ultimately lead to tremendous success.
