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Ask HN: How to encourage my team to learn more and improve our skill set

2 points by nevi-me ↗ HN
I work for a fairly large Data consultancy of about 150 people. We do mostly data management projects, and data analytics.

Most of our house uses SAS, SQL (Microsoft) and Qlik technologies. We have varying skill sets, with about 60% having Engineering or Math/Stats background.

The problem's that we seem to be grooming more 'people managers' than technical people, even our juniors join the team with little coding background, but end up not wanting to program.

What ways can I try to get them into more work that requires using Python, R, JVM family, JS etc. ?

Some people in the team feel like we're falling behind what rest of world does in terms of analytics. It would be great for us to change this position.

Thanks

1 comment

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r2dnb
Answer this question honestly : would your employees feel that it is in their best interest to learn new things and teach them to the company ?

Having a learning-oriented company can only happen if people are aligned, and if making the company smarter makes sense to them.

Most of the time it is the contrary and what makes sense is the status quo and protecting long-earned corporate political capitals.

This is the root that you need to address, the rest will follow.

On another note, I'd be concerned that your junior devs don't like coding. It's a very bad sign. The best senior software managers still insist to have control on the design and the architecture. Bill Gates remained the chief engineer and architect for a reason. Your folks won't be good software managers if they are not passionate about writing good softwares and continuously improving their practice. I think you should replace them.