Picture this: The future has arrived. AI is making its presence felt. It’s everywhere. It can answer most of your questions. It can take and pass most examinations– yes, even the most difficult ones– out there. It can design and produce images. It might have even written this article that you’re reading right now. The things a computer can do are widening everyday. The year is 2023. The future has arrived. 

And in the future, your tech team is developing these systems that can do more and more each day. And the pace of this change is increasing everyday. In today’s day and age, if your tech team is not growing and learning everyday, everybody is missing out. 

The innovations in the tech industry are happening at a quicksilver pace and previous skills are becoming irrelevant every year, every month, every week even. 

It’s becoming more and more essential to constantly learn and grow in the tech industry. As a manager or leader, it’s imperative that you consider a well-planned approach to train your developers and coders to survive and grow in the industry. 

The best part about the tech industry is that brilliance is marked by stark lines of enthusiasm and effort. If developers don’t continually grow, they can reach a plateau in their offerings while the most kickass coders and developers upskill consistently. The world of code is wide and there’s so much to learn. Not only is the pace of learning changing but also the matter. While programming languages and frameworks were the focus subjects of learning hitherto, the focus has already moved to more specialized learning of APIs, security, and compliance. 

What’s the Current Scenario of Learning for Coders and Developers?

• Learning is frequent

Our dependence on technology is only increasing day by day. While we were already moving to this dynamic, the recent pandemic has amplified the speed at which it happened. And the higher the dependence, the more the number of innovations and the higher the amount of effort it takes to stay relevant in the industry. So a constant upgrade of skills and abilities is a part of surviving in the industry now. 

• Learning is career

The baseline of the tech industry is that it changes fast and keeping up with this change is part and parcel of adding value here. Not only does the pace of learning change very fast here but so do the subjects of learning at all. Unless coders and developers continue to stay up to date with the ongoing trends around, they are at high risk of being obsolete in the industry. 

• Learning has to be customized

The needs of learning and development in the industry are becoming more and more detail-oriented. The old standards and methods of learning have become trite and customized solutions are more sought after today. The courses for learning, therefore, have to be carefully curated for personal needs. 

So How Does Developer Training Impact Your Business?

• Reduce and avoid technical debt

With shorter timelines on deliverables, the chances of piling up your technical debt are higher. And to an extent, it’s not entirely bad but if you let it sit unsupervised for some time, it accrues and after a certain stage can upend your whole technical foundation. With regular training and development, your tech team is equipped with the wherewithal to clear it on a routine basis thus creating a healthy equilibrium of work. 

• Turn your average employees into kickass coders

The undercurrents of employment in the tech industry indicate a growing dearth of kickass coders and developers. The chasm between the supply and demand of these coders only seems to be widening in the coming days. So how can you be sure to hire the best of the best in the industry for your dream projects? One, you can hire them at Workfall with ease: workfall.com and you can start training your regular employees to become the creme de la creme of the tech industry. Look at it this way: You give them the resources to become really good at what they do and in turn, they become an asset to your organization. With carefully crafted courses and training programs and constant support, you can be sure that you are investing in the best in the industry. 

• Makes recruiting and retention easy

By paying minute attention to the training and development of your existing manpower, you are creating a culture of growth and learning that is bound to pay off at some point in the future, moreover near future considering the fast pace at which we are moving. This makes you immune to the growing troubles of recruiting and retention in the tech industry. In the process, you’re also addressing the gaps in knowledge and skill and creating a formidable workforce at your organization. 

• Secure code

One of the major risks of moving lives online is the risk of security breaches leading data to being compromised. And the only way of evading this risk is by investing in a foundation that is fundamentally secure. With specialized training, companies can ensure that their tech team is well-versed with sophisticated security systems. Timely training and development ensure that coders and developers can identify vulnerabilities in the system much faster and can take steps to mitigate them before they create a risk of breach. Over time just this simple process can reduce the rate of vulnerabilities with a tight and accurate code as its very base. 

Essential Steps to Conducting a Successful T&D for Your Tech Team

Now that you’re convinced of the absolute importance of T&D for your tech team, it’s now time to understand how to conduct a successful T&D program. And another one after that. And yet another. And another…

You get the drift. 

So here goes the essential manual (I’d recommend you save it for future use) to conduct the most essential T&D program at your organization: 

Step 1: Skill assessment

This has got to be the most essential step of training and development. Despite it being crucial, most organizations tend to get this one wrong because of how simple it seems. But it’s the most crucial step to conducting a well-founded training session. A meticulous assessment of existing skill levels helps you decide which areas need development and helps you tailor the training program accordingly to attend to the most pressing development needs of your team. 

Step 2: Tailoring the course

Once you have identified the gaps that need attention, you can then tailor a training and development program suited specifically to your needs. The old modules of blanket training programs are failing in the new work environment with a new time and tech needs. With the passing of time, we are coming to appreciate our diverse needs as people and organizations, and with tailor-made courses, you can rest assured that the needs of learning at your organization are met with utmost care and detail. 

Step 3: Conducting the T&D program

Once you’ve completed the course material, it’s critical that you create an environment conducive to learning. You must ensure that your employees have adequate time to go through the learning process and a safe environment in which to ask the necessary questions.

Step 4: Make the learning applicable

It’s rightfully said that experience seals learning. Create and offer enough chances to your employees to transmute the nascent learning into a skill. Since you have begun the process with a careful skill assessment, you should have enough of these opportunities to corroborate what they have learned and use it as a quantifiable skill going forward. 

Step 5: Keep it going

What most managers/ leaders tend to get wrong is that they do the training program once and then forget about it altogether. But with the blistering pace of change in the tech industry, you can’t afford complacency. Either you make it a routine process or just add it as a part of the bonus or welcome the new year, ensuring that T&D becomes a part of your culture. Until then keep following the above steps from 1 to 5 (Step 5 being the most important)

Trending Methods in the Space

A series of newfangled methods are now available for training the tech team. However, industry leaders are picking among the available methods depending on their unique vision and arriving at their own ways of making T&D a part of the company culture. Customization is the key, we told you. 

Again, harking back to the crucial need for skill assessment comes in handy in picking out the methods that are suited best to the unique needs of every organization. In-person training, Online training, on-the-job training, mentoring and coaching, conferences and seminars, certification programs, and cross-training among others are popular methods deployed by several industry players to engage and teach their tech teams. You can either choose among them or use all of them at different rates as pertinent to the needs of your tech team. 

The key aspect here for every business is to recognize that every single one of them is unique and so are the coders and developers that form the backbone of their technical proficiency. As long as businesses identify the need to build a unique training program that can only address their tech needs at a particular time, they can create and build a strong T&D culture that can last over a long period of time. A few nicks and dings will always keep moving, but the foundation becomes more and more concrete. 

A stable foundation of T&D is rewarding not only in the long term but its benefits are clearly palpable in the shorter term as well. To sum up, here is an overview of the ROI of T&D culture:

• Boosts morale and motivation
• Streamlines processes and is time-saving
• Makes the adoption of new technology easier
• Faster and more efficient decision making
• Reduced employee turnover
• Increased resources to overcome competition
• Saves time and resources. (Even if the others on the list are things you want to address later, just this is reason enough to invest in T&D)

Conclusion

The need for a healthy challenge and an opportunity for growth is a very inherent need for every individual. This need is further augmented when these individuals are a part of the most dynamic industry of today’s day and age– tech. Developers are also seeking more from their jobs now. And unless their need for constant learning and growth is fulfilled at their current jobs, they will continue to look out for better opportunities. The shift from economic satisfaction is shifting towards a more holistic life and this trend is forecasted to only grow in the coming times. 

To sum up, developers are writing the future in their codes. They are building the very systems that the modern world relies most heavily on. And just for this simple reason, they should be given every possible opportunity for growth and learning. If your organization already is a space for development for your tech team, there’s no doubt that you’re already winning.