Budgets for many training and development activities may have been reduced, but that doesn’t mean we should eliminate options for keeping our team current and engaged. Training offers more than best practices and instruction. It can re-engage ourselves and our teams, help us solve ongoing challenges and help us learn to make better decisions in our every day practices.

 

 

• Pair Programming – This technique involves two developers working together at the same workstation, on the same piece of code. One enters the code while the other reviews the code as it is being typed. By working side by side knowledge is continuously shared between team members. As a result, new approaches to writing code, solving problems and understanding the system are transferred to both team members. Working together to solve a problem also often results in improved morale, team building and overall growth and development.

• Brown Bag Seminars – Why not tap into the knowledge currently employed on your team and have your technical experts indulge other team members? The idea is workers bring their lunch, or the company supplies lunch and various subject matter experts (SME) present a topic to other team members. The SME spends some time preparing beforehand, but the investment is minimal. Similar to pair programming, I find this approach more interactive and effective in not only transferring knowledge, but team building.

• eLearning Courses – While not as personable and direct as classroom training and boot camps, eLearning courses offer a lower cost alternative. You can even have employees sign up for different courses and then present their findings and overall key points to the rest of the group, allowing all team members to take advantage of the course selection at large.

• Reference Books – Everyone learns differently. For me, I can read, plain text and turn it into practice. Others could be more visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners. Reference books vary in their presentation of material, so just because it is a text doesn’t mean it won’t be suitable for various types of learners. 

 

• Subscriptions – In our individual professions, we each likely subscribe to a professional membership. Typically within these memberships there are resources, blogs, online communities, trade magazines and online training materials. All of these resources are beneficial in advancing in our profession and expanding our networks.

• Webcasts – There are numerous resources available online, ranging from business case to technical know-how web casts. Most are sponsored by another company, so you will need to endure some advertising, but there is always something to learn from every situation. Most offer a download and access to the archived version. I usually grab them and save them for a later date.

With expenditure reductions, we still need to grow and develop our team and need to look for creative ways to keep our team engaged and advancing. Training and employee development for IT and knowledge workers overall is more important than any other profession. The complexity and importance of IT professions requires strong and continuous advancement of knowledge. As professionals it is certainly the responsibility of the individual to identify training of interest, it is also important as PMs and technology leaders that we reinforce the need for training. The ideas above will hopefully allow this important ongoing initiative to continue, regardless of the state of the economy.

Related Links
Review this example training and support framework to see how one company built low-cost, high impact options into their development programs. Build a PMO website your PMs will love with suggestions from this requirements checklist. Find out what kinds of training and support your project managers really want with this survey. Turn code reviews into a learning experience instead of a dissertation defense.