In our world the only constant is change and with that the ability to educate and re-educate becomes crucial to develop relevant knowledge throughout one's career.
Especially with a role in tech, where many new libraries, frameworks, platforms, and best practices are evolving it is crucial to stay up to date with the latest, but also with established technologies.
For the last five years I have worked as a software developer. In several teams I experienced that learning is supported by management, but at the end of the day, very few team members invested time into self-learning.
At H&M Group: AI, Data and Analytics where I work now, we are encouraged use 10-15% of our time for learning. However, just having the allowance does not enable one to spend time on skill development. With tight delivery schedules during product development, it can be challenging to make learning a part of one's routines and a priority over code delivery.
In this post I want to highlight some techniques that you could try out if you too struggle finding the time for learning.
It all starts with a vision and a goal . . .
Be very explicit about what you want to learn, and it is even more important to distill why you need to acquire that skill. Having a clear goal in mind and being prepared with convincing arguments will make it easier to pledge your case to your manager to elevate your skill development over other priorities. Those priorities could come from your product team, but also from within, since delivering code might often feel more productive than studying a new concept that cannot be put immediately into use.
Here are a couple of questions that you should answer to get more clarity about your learning goal.
Instead of saying "I want to know XYZ" I want you to be very specific and phrase your goal more like "I want to learn XYZ, because I need to know letters to improve my writing skill, which will help me in providing understandable blog posts to my audience."
Whenever there is pressure coming from outside or you are questioning if the time for your learning is well spent, you can go back to your objective and re-evaluate if you are still on the right track.
Now that you know what to do and have a better understanding about how this learning can look like, the tricky part remains of integrating learning in your schedule. There are different methods that you can try out.
For many of us that work in teams, an empty calendar means free time, rather than occupied time. Even though we get most of our work done during those un-booked time slots. To reduce the risk of being booked for meetings, one strategy can be to block a timeslot in your own calendar, when you can focus on progression towards your learning objective. Depending on the scope and the time you will spend on learning, the time slots can vary. You can even have reoccurring timeslots, which will help you to establish a routine. An initial time for this could be between 1-3h. Remember to take breaks as well.
If you usually work in a ticket system like Jira, you can write your learning steps in a comparable way as you would otherwise write user stories and tasks. By having the learning steps as tickets on your team board, it makes it transparent for your team and manager what you spend your time on. This can be especially important if you need to spend longer time than just a time block in your calendar as I described earlier. It can also result into finding a study buddy if somebody in your team is also interested in the same topic.
If you genuinely want to develop a learning organization, then leaving all responsibility to individual learning cannot be the only option. Most companies plan for quarters and years. At H&M we plan our deliveries by the different development teams on a quarterly level with 13 weeks (about 3 months) which are split into 6 sprints. The last sprint of each quarter is not only 3 weeks long, to make the math work, but also to allow time for planning for the following quarter, learning, and innovating. The idea of this last sprint is that most deliverables are shipped by then and the team can spend time on unconventional tasks. Having the time of sprints and quarters aligned within the whole department also gives the possibility to arrange bigger initiatives that spread over several days like hackathons to make people meet and connect or dive deeper into different topics.
When you get closer to reaching the goal of your learning journey, think about how you are going to summarize and share your new insights.
You could present you learnings during your demo sessions, if you are working using scrum ways of working, or hold a presentation during lunch & learn. If there is no initiative like that, it is time to start one.
You could also reach out to a meet-up group that is interested in hosting talks about the topic you were investigating.
Or you could also write down your thoughts and key take away points in form of a page on your team’s documentation space, or a blog post.
Or do you even want to write a script and record a video?
There are many ways to share, which medium you choose is up to your preference.
Now I am curious to hear if you tried any of the approaches to integrate learning in your work. Or do you have some tips that you want to share?
Let us discuss in the comments below or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
All the best,
Christine