As technology rapidly evolves, software engineers have to stay on top of the latest technologies and deliver products to market faster than ever before. Without an effective developer-focused L&D program, even the most experienced teams will fall behind, slowing down your entire organization.
Engineering managers understand the importance of developer learning. But when it comes to building a structured learning program, most kick the can down the road. Why?
Engineering managers have limited bandwidth to research learning solutions and find the best fit for their team.
Even with the right learning solution, developers have very little time to pause and learn a new system.
As a result of these time constraints, engineering often falls into crisis mode learning.
For example, instead of proactively training developers in the latest version of a language, engineering managers wait until the old version goes out of support. Now, there's no choice but to upskill ASAP.
Learning in crisis mode is incredibly painful for everyone. Engineering managers scramble to find quality resources and create a learning plan. Developers have to build new skills and navigate new resources while juggling their existing workload.
The alternative to crisis mode learning is a continuous learning culture.
A continuous learning culture integrates learning into everyday workflows — so that from the moment a developer joins your organization, they consistently build new skills to move your product forward. When learning is ongoing and proactive, instead of last-minute and reactive, engineering can avoid crisis mode altogether.
So how do engineering teams build a continuous learning culture? This is where L&D comes in.
Engineering needs your expertise to find a learning solution that meets their needs — and implement it without slowing down the team. This is a challenging project, especially if you haven't collaborated with engineering before. However, with the right approach, you can make lasting improvements to developer productivity.
We've talked with hundreds of engineering teams about the challenges of implementing a developer learning solution. Based on these conversations, we created an approach to help L&D professionals form a productive partnership with engineering and build an effective, sustainable learning program.
Let's dive in.
Start with Onboarding
One of the key obstacles to building a structured developer learning program is time.
Engineering teams have incredibly limited bandwidth. Developers are under constant pressure to meet deadlines and innovate, so there's never a great time to pause and work with L&D to set up learning plans.
That's why we encourage L&D to introduce learning programs during onboarding, before developers have time-sensitive deliverables.
When you introduce learning during onboarding, it becomes a natural part of the engineering workflow. As a result, you can orient developers to the learning solution and set the expectation for continuous learning.
Introducing learning during onboarding sets the stage for future learning. However, it also has an immediate impact by reducing developer ramp-up time. If you can get new developers to write a line of code faster, you'll create value for the business and establish credibility with your engineering partners. This trust is vital to launching a successful developer learning program.
So how do you introduce learning during onboarding?
Keep the scope of the project small. If you try to launch a full-blown developer university overnight, it won't meet engineering needs, you'll burn out, and it will damage your rapport with the team.
Instead, work with engineering to revamp their existing onboarding plan using a platform like DevPath — one that allows you to combine your content with pre-built technical courses.
Before you reach out to engineering to start the project, you'll want to understand what they need in a developer onboarding plan. Engineering managers are busy, so the more prepared you are in that initial meeting, the more you can establish trust and have a productive collaboration.
To prepare you for that conversation, there are 3 main areas of onboarding you'll want to focus on.
Company and team knowledge
Technical skills and internal tools
Projects to ramp up on
3 Areas to Cover in Developer Onboarding
1. Company and team knowledge
While L&D is well versed in communicating company and team knowledge, engineering is more focused on writing code. As a result, engineering may not think to address questions like:
How does your team contribute to the business goals of the organization?
On a team level, what specific workflows and processes do developers use to achieve those goals?
What behavioral norms and leadership principles are developers expected to uphold?
If you discuss these questions with engineering, you can work with them to create effective onboarding documentation and take the lead on communicating this information to new hires. This is an opportunity for L&D to relieve a huge burden for engineering managers.
Communicating team and company knowledge at the start of onboarding is hugely valuable to engineering. But you can take that one step further by reinforcing these expectations periodically.
The value of reinforcing team and company knowledge is backed by an experiment at Google.
Early in the onboarding process, new Google developers attended a 15-minute presentation about the importance of proactively asking questions and seeking feedback. Two weeks later, one group of new hires received a follow-up message encouraging them to own their learning and take risks. Another group received no follow-up.
The result? New hires who received the follow-up asked for feedback more frequently, became productive faster, and more accurately assessed their own performance.
You can unlock these benefits by helping engineering managers define and communicate behavioral norms during onboarding. When new hires understand your norms and practices from day 1, it will pay dividends down the road.
2. Technical skills and internal tools
Not many L&D professionals have a robust technical background. Fortunately, you don't need one to help engineering address technical skills and internal tools in their onboarding plan. All you need to do is present engineering with a custom learning solution.
What do we mean by custom learning?
You're probably familiar with traditional developer learning resources. They're often generic videos that cover standard technologies like Python and Javascript — and developers can find them frustrating for a few reasons:
Generic videos aren't easily tailored to your company or team context. As a result, developers can spend hours scrubbing through videos for the information they need.
Videos aren't hands-on. Developers don't get the opportunity to apply learning right away, which diminishes understanding and recall of technical concepts.
Stock courses don't cover your engineering team's internal tools, forcing developers to bounce between multiple environments during onboarding. This disjointed learning experience prevents developers from reaching full productivity quickly.
Custom learning avoids these pitfalls by integrating every onboarding resource you need into one plan. Instead of bouncing between learning environments, developers progress through a streamlined curriculum of interactive courses and internal documentation.
As L&D experts, you are the people engineering managers look to for recommended learning resources. If you provide a solution that delivers org-specific learning, you can help developers ramp up on technical skills and internal tools for 3x faster onboarding.
3. Projects to ramp up on
You can't drop new developers into a project and expect them to contribute right away. To set them up for success, you'll need to communicate the context and work that's been done.
Of course, some of this project knowledge can be communicated through peer mentorship. But we also know that senior developers are busy. The more time they spend training new hires, the less time they spend coding.
At some point, developers will need easy access to robust documentation.
If you're familiar with engineering documentation practices, you know it's common for docs to be scattered across multiple knowledge platforms. Not exactly ideal for new hires orienting to your systems and projects.
With a custom learning solution, you can overcome information sprawl by selecting the precise docs you need — no matter where they live — and integrating them into a streamlined plan new hires can follow.
This saves countless hours on your team. Instead of digging through various wikis or asking peers for information, new hires can progress through your custom learning plan, immediately access the right docs, and emerge ready to contribute.
Next Steps: Expand Your Developer Learning Program
Now, let's say you've had a successful collaboration with engineering. Together, you used a custom learning solution to build an onboarding plan that reduces ramp-up time and seamlessly integrates new hires on the team.
What are your next steps? How can a great onboarding plan expand into a structured, continuous learning program?
Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog series, where you'll learn how to:
Measure the impact of your onboarding plan
Scale your learning program over time
Adapt these lessons for engineers at your organization
Free Resources
