Team Education and Training
Our teams and team members grow organically by overcoming challenges within their daily work. To build a learning organization, our teams and team members also need guidance and coaching to progress into more senior roles. As an organization, we prioritize growth as a specific goal and take actionable steps to increase and share our body of knowledge over time.
Both technical and personal growth are achieved by facing challenges we have not encountered before. This growth is accelerated (and is a far more pleasant experience) when done in a safe environment with an active support network to fall back on. Natural growth within an organization is encouraged through practices such as innersourcing, establishing a blameless culture with reflection processes and feedback cycles, and self-service products like well-written documentation.
Education Vectors
No serious sports team would consider not hiring coaches, and neither should we. Additional external growth vectors are instituted through:
- Dedicated team coaches
- Mentoring practices with senior staff
- Facilitating practices with enabling teams as defined in Supporting Teams
- Organizing company-wide conferences and knowledge-sharing events
- Rotating engineers between teams.
When building a vertical team, we should consider the degree of professional diversity the team allows and how effective our team members are at teaching and mentoring. For long-term tasks and teams, it is highly encouraged to partner junior engineers with didactically competent leads. Chances are the job market composes more senior engineers' job postings than there are senior engineers available, so we want to grow our own.
Facilitating transparent requirements for career progression within our organization supports the organic professional development of our employees.