The technology market evolves fast, and we love learning about new approaches and technologies. Self-education and training are indeed a part of our everyday work activity.
We truly believe that talent development is a crucial activity in modern teams. We spoke to Artem Aksenov, JetStyle’s Business Optimization Director & Scrum master, and he shared a few of our most favorite activities. You could find them useful for your own HR-flow:
First of all, how do we make our knowledge sharing efficient?
- Our agile approach is special, as we involve our junior managers and developers at all stages: briefings, research activities, hypothesis development sessions, experiments, discussions. Thus they manage to gain more experience with each iteration.
- We encourage employee independence: all of our specialists develop and release features independently, involving others where help is needed. People learn from their mistakes, and become more creative in their work processes.
- Junior specialists, just like the rest of the team, communicate with our clients, specify task details and present their work. So we do our best to provide abundant feedback from colleagues and clients to developers of all levels, as it teaches people to see the consequences of their actions.
Here's a list of practices we use regularly to stimulate knowledge sharing within our team:
- Daily small talk about IT
It’s so incredibly effective, low-effort and easy to implement. A regular information flow is a part of our work environment. Be it new tech reviews or news, hottest IT-related tweets or memes – we use every source or format available to make professional communication a standard practice.
We are true IT & tech geeks, and it is a core value that is nurtured throughout all our departments. Whenever we manage to integrate the latest tech feature into our project, it gives us a special type of professional pride. Then we do our best to distribute this experience to all development teams.
- Experiments as part of work culture
“What if” is our favorite question phrase, because experimenting initiates creative problem-solving.
It gives tons of valuable experience for all members of the team. However, it may be effort-consuming to create a space for experiments and control their outcomes, time- and cost-wise.
Despite all potential risks, this activity boosts skill growth and provides experience of working with a new technology, so it’s definitely worth it.
- Public speaking
Knowing how to use a tool is one thing, but explaining it to others is an actual art, which we constantly develop together with our colleagues. To do so, we speak at dozens of conferences every year, conduct weekly internal demos, and teach students at universities as part of our continuous learning culture.
We talked about training juniors, but what about those on the other side of the process?
For some senior-level specialists mentoring can be energy-consuming. However, at JetStyle we’ve managed to prove that mentoring is an incredibly advantageous activity for seniors. Artem Aksenov told us why our senior-level specialists value mentoring processes and what advantages they find in communication with juniors.
🎲Mentoring provides a lot of potential for career development. A person who can teach other people is a next-level professional, and all of our senior developers and designers regularly teach junior and middle colleagues various skills.
🎲Mentoring helps to dig deeper into the subject, because explaining something you know to a different person requires extra study and preparation.
🎲It improves employee’s management skills. Senior specialists may reach their top productivity if they are good at delegating responsibility and routine tasks. It’s a natural way for a company to increase its productivity and effectiveness.
🎲Human interaction and engagement creates value for both the team and the company. As the company grows, mentoring skills are essential for adapting the team for higher workload.
Hopefully, we revealed some useful insights about how we develop our team. Let us know if you use similar practices in your company.
