In Part 1 of How Learning & Development Can Partner with Engineering, we discussed how you can lay the foundation for a continuous learning culture by creating an effective onboarding plan.
Now, let's say you had a successful collaboration with engineering. Using a custom learning solution, you built an onboarding plan that reduces ramp-up time and seamlessly integrates new hires on the team.
What comes next? Today, we'll walk you through the second phase of this project: how to expand your onboarding plan into a structured, continuous learning program for all developers.
Next Steps: Expand Your Developer Learning Program
Step 1: Measure and communicate the impact of your onboarding plan
Building a developer learning program takes time and resources. To justify the use of those resources, you'll need clear evidence that your approach to developer learning is effective.
This data collection doesn't have to be complicated, and you can use familiar strategies from your work in L&D.
Throughout onboarding, for example, you can provide quick check-in questions for new hires and managers. These questions might assess qualitative aspects of the new hire's performance and their experience of the onboarding process.
Later, when you report on the impact of the onboarding plan, you can pair this qualitative data with quantitative metrics. The metric we'd recommend is time to productivity. Based on the average time to productivity prior to implementing your onboarding plan, you can determine the time you've saved the engineering team onboarding new hires.
This visibility is important because it shows what you're giving back to the business. If leadership doesn't know the impact you're making, you won't be able to get the resources you need to expand your developer learning program — and you'll miss out on opportunities to grow your career at the organization.
Step 2: Identify engineering blockers
Now that you've built a rapport with engineering, you have their ear. This gives you more authority to initiate conversations like:
What skill gaps exist that could impact delivery down the road?
What courses would help the team code better and work smarter?
From there, you can recommend specific courses and build out custom learning paths to bridge gaps before the team reaches a crisis point. Now, developers can easily dive into learning because:
Onboarding set the expectation that learning is part of the engineering workflow.
Developers are already familiar with the learning platform.
Here's where continuous learning can really take off. Over time, individual onboarding and learning paths build up into a robust developer learning program — one that starts with onboarding and never stops. This ensures that your program can make an impact quickly while growing at a sustainable rate.
How DevPath Can Help
Integrating learning into engineering workflows is hard. There are a number of obstacles in your path. But you can overcome these obstacles — not by working harder, but by strategically partnering with engineering.
As you research custom learning solutions to use for your program, we invite you to learn more about DevPath.
We built DevPath based on hundreds of conversations with engineering teams about the challenges of implementing a learning solution. Time and time again, here's what engineering managers told us they need:
No more generic videos
If you're learning how to swim, you get in the water. DevPath provides 1000+ hands-on courses, assessments, and projects so developers can practice as they go.
Custom learning paths
Stock courses aren't easily tailored to your team context. DevPath allows you to combine your content + our courses in streamlined learning and onboarding paths.
A simple way to manage learning
From our central dashboard, engineering managers can easily assign content, see progress, and resolve blockers before they slow you down.
DevPath provides a custom learning solution that fits into every team's workflow. We're here to help you implement it during the most flexible time in a developer's tenure: onboarding.
Want to explore how DevPath can jumpstart developer learning at your organization?
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