How to Invest in Engineers' Growth 🪴

Real-world strategies, programs, and ideas, to enable continuous professional development at work.

Professional development for engineers has been a big interest of mine for a long time.

This dates back to the first years of my startup, around ~2012, when we had to hire our first engineers. The tech ecosystem in Rome is small-ish and it was hard for us to find devs who had any experience in our stack (Ruby on Rails).

So, since both myself and Disheng, one of my co-founders, were PhD students, we leveraged our university connections to create internships and hire people straight out of their Bachelors or Masters. Then, during their first months we would teach them everything about the tech.

Now, this use case was quite specific and born out of necessity but, in general, investing in the professional growth of engineers is a total no brainer for any tech company.

In fact, it brings benefits across the board:

• 💼 Hiring — it makes hiring easier, cheaper and faster, by lowering the bar of the experience you need to hire for.

• 🔄 Turnover — it reduces turnover, by creating growth opportunities for engineers.

• 🏃‍♂️ Productivity — it obviously increases productivity, by improving engineers’ skills.

It also turns out professional growth is what engineers value the most. A while back we ran a wide survey about engineering careers, and asked hundreds of managers and developers why they had changed jobs in the past. Growth is #1 👇

Still, creating a good process for this is hard. You can’t just slap an O’Reilly subscription on your team and call it a day.

So, this piece collects the best ideas from some of the smartest people I know, plus learnings from my experience, and insights backed by research.

Here is what we will cover:

• 🎓 Passive vs Interactive — ranking learning experiences by effectiveness.

• ⚖️ Exploratory vs targeted — the two goals of learning.

• 💼 Learning at work — real-world programs, tactics, and workflows to help your engineers grow.

• 🎁 Special deal for paid subscribers — for an upcoming Refactoring product for teams.

Let’s dive in 👇

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🎓 ICAP framework

The ICAP framework was created in 2014 by Michelene Chi, who demonstrated how higher student engagement leads to a better learning outcome.

ICAP buckets learning experiences into four main categories, in ascending order of engagement, and, therefore, effectiveness:

1. 🔴 Passive — experiences where you are just exposed to some learning material, like a book, or a lecture.

2. 🟡 Active — experiences where you have exercises to complete as part of your learning like regular online courses.

3. 🟢 Constructive — experiences where you learn by doing. Building is a core part of the learning process, like in a workshop.

4. 🟣 Interactive — experiences where constructive learning is augmented by asking questions and getting continuous, real-time feedback, like in pair programming.

Interactive learning leads to the highest retention, especially in areas that are very hands-on, like tech skills.

You can put popular education options on this scale, from the most passive to the most engaging: books, newsletters, online courses, workshops, 1:1 coaching, pair programming, etc.

When it comes to the quality of learning, there is no doubt that the more you move to the right, the better.

However, deep interactive experiences are not always the best call. In fact, these are also:

1. Hard to design — it’s tough to create learning material that includes a lot of building and active stuff, as opposed to simple slides or text.

2. Hard to scale / expensive — the more feedback loop people need, the more bespoke the experience needs to be, the worse it scales. Some of the most interactive learning experiences in tech are pair programming and coaching, which are both 1:1.

3. Demanding for the learner — interactivity is about intensity. You are getting more results because you are putting it more effort. You can’t always afford that.

So, passive experiences may have low retention but are also cheaper and low-effort. Sometimes, that’s bad — but sometimes that’s just what you need.

E.g. I am a fan of the RealLifeLore Youtube channel to learn more about geopolitics. I don’t have a personal goal about this, so I am just happy to watch some videos, knowing that my understanding will be shallow, and retention low. Also, I usually watch them over lunch, so I don’t really have the energy bandwidth for more. For this use case, the passive approach is perfect!

So, I believe you can maximize learning by finding the right blend of passive and active experiences, based on what you need the learning for. Let’s see how to use this for work 👇

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⚖️ Exploratory vs Targeted learning

As a basic mental model, I have found it useful to organize learning experiences into two broad categories, based on your goals about them:

• 🔭 Exploratory — this is serendipitous learning. You learn stuff for the sake of it, driven by your curiosity.

• 🎯 Targeted — this is learning that is driven by some goal. You learn something because e.g. you need to perform a certain task.

As it is often the case, this is more of a spectrum than a black/white separation:

• The geopolitics videos I watch over lunch are 100% exploratory.

• The React Native workshops I attended years ago when we had to create our mobile app were 100% targeted.

• Me looking into Astro because it looks cool and might turn out useful one day is… kind of in between.

There is a balance to be found between the two, that, to me, looks like ~80% targeted and 20% exploratory.

In fact, I believe most learning should be directed to specific goals. That’s how you are the most effective and how you should spend the most of your learning coins. However, you also want to keep some slack and encourage casual, serendipitous learning in your life and that of your teammates.

This is similar to the recommendation algorithm of Spotify — actually, I don’t know, I have no idea how it works — but I would like it to 1) 80% double down on things that I like, and 2) 20% make me discover random stuff that is different from what I listen, so I don’t corner myself into the same things over and over.

As for learning modes, you want to invest in interactive experiences for targeted learning, while it is ok to go for passive, more laid back ones for exploratory stuff.

So, you wouldn’t do pair programming for learning some new exotic tech that may or may not be useful in the future. At the same time, if you have a pressing problem, reading a book isn’t probably your first choice — you may rather get personalized help by talking with a peer, or a coach.

So, how do you create such experiences at work? 👇