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Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

sloanreview.mit.edu

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Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#11

Post by rafaelvasco »

swarnie_ wrote: post #4

This is why i love my current employer and i won't leave unless i'm forced to. We have a policy of "Chargeable work always comes first but if you've got nothing to do go learn something, we'll call you when something comes in" This has lead to times before where we go dead around the same time every year and you spend 2 months being paid to independently upskill. Come the busy November-February period its really obvi…

Yeah, here in my work, and all others i've worked, If you say that you don't have anything to do because you finished it all, people panic.

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#12

Post by sethammons »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged. That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like the…

I recommend making it part of regular cadence. Every Friday or every other Friday (or part of the day). You can encourage them to share learnings or summaries with the teams. These days can also be used to attempt to apply learnings in ways that improve the team or org. These don't need to be formal courses or books either: it can be exploring and learning systems at work, or understanding system telemetry or customer use cases better.

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#15

Post by acollins1331 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged. That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like the…

Hire me. I love to get paid to watch MIT lectures that will benefit my work.

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#17

Post by bigred100 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged. That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like the…

As an employee I’ve felt like it’s hard in the past to take initiative and do things that aren’t immediately and clearly justifiable as strictly necessary work. Reading a book might or might not be useful but doing something boring but mandatory is certainly not slacking. With that said any time I tried to take more initiative and take more risks (while making a sincere effort to work on the thing that’s going to move the group/project forward) and then just accept correction if I make the wrong call, usually work was more enjoyable and I was more productive (by estimation of me, other coworkers, and my manager).

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#18

Post by jpincheira »

Bootwizard wrote: post #9

I'm currently a frontend engineer. I told my team lead a while back that I'd like to transition to the server side, especially since our server team is woefully understaffed and our frontend team is overstaffed. He told me "Sure but you'll need to learn all that stuff on your own time". So I never did it because I'm interested in doing other things at home.

Bad. Went I went from JS front end to iOS, I was put in a learning period on my own + internship in the iOS team and that worked great. It’s how companies like Spotify also did it. They paid companies like the Big Nerd Ranch to travel to Stockholm and give workshops to future iOS devs.

They benefited and I also did, as it helped me evolve into a full-stack (web, mobile & server) developer. This was essential for me to transition into building my own company [1] at a later point, as I could build the product on my own both for web and mobile.

[1] https://standups.io

Re: Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it

#20

Post by habnds »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

That you should “always be learning” is absolutely true. It helps with neuro-plasticity and keeps you engaged. That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like the…

It's because when annual reviews happen they aren't talking about the books they read they're talking about a project that they contributed to.

In my experience formalizing "learning" in the work place doesn't work because it requires the performance of learning for management types rather than real learning which involves working through real new problems over an extended period of time.

The real way to get employees to learn is to hand them responsibilities they are not fully prepared for along with the pay that goes with them and see how it goes. Right or wrong managers are rarely comfortable doing that.

Employees need to be comfortable failing in front of you and few are because there are few good examples of that turning out well. When it does go well, all too often the raise they were promised doesn't come through.

this isn't to say you're a poor manager, just that it's unusual to have a healthy environment for on the job learning.

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