It’s really important that everyone in the team knows that learning and growing is part of their job. It’s something we pay them to do, and it shouldn’t be an afterthought or deprioritised.
Some ways we do that at Charlie are:
We have regular 1:1 meetings between line managers and reports which focus on wellbeing and personal development. As much as possible we keep day-to-day “what’s happening with project X?” conversations out of those 1:1s.
I’m a huge fan of Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management book which goes into detail on mentoring, coaching, feedback, and sponsorship.
For junior developers this often looks like helping them to identify their unknown unknowns, directing them to resources such as books or videos to support their learning, and helping them to build the delivery and communication skills they need.
After completing probation we support everyone to build an annual plan for their learning and growth. By looking 12 months out we can be ambitious, tackle larger opportunities for development, and progress across knowledge, delivery and leadership skills.
Junior developers may or may not be new to work, depending on whether they switched careers or not. They may need additional help in understanding what their options are for their career and where the gaps in their knowledge or expertise are. Although our progression framework only has two tracks (individual contributor and people manager) I often talk about splitting the IC track again, into generalist and specialist, which helps junior devs to understand how their career could develop.
To support progress against the personal development plan, everyone gets 2 hours a week to work directly on learning or projects that will support their personal development.
For junior developers this will most often be spent reading - books or code - to develop their knowledge and understanding of programming techniques.
Additionally we have regular days where we down tools on our ongoing projects and explore something completely different. People are encouraged to work with new people on new things, with an emphasis on learning and no expectation of shipping or even finishing the project.
For junior developers this can be a great opportunity for them to get out of their comfort zone and pair with more experienced developers on something fresh.
Bootcamp graduates will often have run rails new more times than our experienced devs, and may teach them a thing or two about getting something new prototyped in a day!