I’ve worked hard this year to strengthen our core development skills at NML, and started some initiatives to help our teams grow both their personal skill sets, as well as their effectiveness as teams.
One initiative involves letting our developers vote on topics they want me to lead in a learning session. I will then prepare (or sometimes just explore) the topic in an hour and a half session with them.
Generally I will also post a challenge to them afterwards on the topic we covered and then review their entries in a follow up hour long session.
I also normally follow these sessions up with a standard list of questions in a survey that I asked the developers to complete. I try to incorporate the feedback in subsequent sessions where possible.
Thus far these sessions have been very well received within the company. The feedback I’ve received is that, along with other initiatives, it has made a big difference at NML in spreading knowledge and helping our developers further their skills development.
I will be posting the recordings, challenges, and reviews over the next couple of days. Some of the recordings’ quality is not the greatest, but we didn’t intend a professional set of training videos. More just a record for prosperity.