Part of the success of a cross-functional team is the ability of each member to be T-Shaped. But how can you encourage continued up-skilling when your business is scaling.
In Seccl, Amy has established Skills Exchange Session, a peer-to-peer learning scheme that is free, valuable and empowers your teams. In this session, Amy will touch on:
- The successes of peer to peer learning;
- The challenges of this type of learning; and
- How you can enable these sessions in your own workplace
5. Learning is for life
But it’s easy to get caught in your day job
6. • Experiencedin Nodedevelopment
• Full Stack – JavaScript, TypeScript, React and Node.js
• Workedwith MongoDB
• Workedwith Amazon Web Servicesincluding Lambda, SQS
and SNSand knowledgeof serverless environments.
Software Engineer
• Research method for architecture
• Accessibility Guidelines
• Asking great questions
• Using space indesign
• Typography
• Usability Testing
Images from an article by Patrick Buggy
The foundations of
your skills
The extra bits
A job spec for an engineer
15. 5 out of 7 as of today
Our teams have increased their confidence massively
16. • Don’t be too polished
• There’s no need to be nervous
• Share something you’re passionate about
• Give tasks or exercises
• Keep it relatively short
How to share your skills
Some of my best tips
17. • Can be fine tuned to your industry
• Comes from working experts
• Free
• Fosters great networks
• Improves performance of teamwork
• Makes you feel great about yourself!
Let’s recap
The top hits of the in-house Skills Exchange
Thank you for turning up to listen to me.
I’m a product designer with about 12 years experience.
I’m super passionate about accessibility, user experience and sometimes even design.
In a past life, I’ve coded websites (poorly), worked in video and been a business analyst for big ecommerce CRM.
Today I want to talk to you about continuous learning.
Why you should keep it up throughout your career.
I’ll take you through one method I’ve found that works, why I think it works and how you can do it yourself!
This is a snippet of some of the assessments I underwent to figure out why I was struggling so much at university.
My A levels had been a bit of a disaster compared to the rest of my academic record.
Turns out I’m dyspraxic and, like many people, went unnoticed until I was an adult.
And so…for quite a few years, I shied away from the thought of learning.
I work for Seccl. We’re a business to business financial technology scale up. Say that a few times.
Here are a few of us when we got some new hoodies!
I like to teach this lot – and the rest – anything I know that they want to know.
The skills to perform your day job do change over the years. If you’re an engineer you’re likely to pick up several new coding or scripting languages in your working life.
If you’re good at your job you’ll stay employed.
What about collaboration?
How do you contribute to design sprints? Do you have the knowledge needed to design and build the best product?
Get comfortable with this slide – we’ll be here a while.
Let’s take the metaphor of the jar of life. Lots of you will know (explain jar of life)
A software engineer at Seccl needs these skills – and some others. I’ve picked them from a recent job specification That’s a great starting point. They may even feel like they have a full suite of knowledge and tools to get their job done. But having some additional skills is going to make you really fantastic at your job. If you can contribute to team solution design, or figure out what padding looks good (when you sneak in a little code at 9pm and the designer isn’t online)
Or maybe even get something you’ve just finished coding in front of an internal customer and ask some great questions…
We’ve built up a whole load of other skills that will be useful to you as you go through your career
Sure – you work with some fantastic experts. They know their stuff.
But have you ever worked in a team full of T shaped employees?
T shaped team members is no new thing.
I remember learning about it when I first started working in cross functional teams.
This is a shortcut to great collaboration. It is the shortcut to superspeed.
For me, as the designer, it means I can talk about giving more space to some page elements and the engineer is nodding along with me. Not preparing to challenge me.
As the researcher, it means I can bring an engineer along to a customer discovery call. Not only do they get loads of insights from it, they also feel able to ask questions in a really constructive manner.
For the engineers on my team, it means they can talk about containers and the structure of the page and know that I’ll get it. It means they can push back on some new design elements and know I’ll understand and start thinking about better ways to design that for our build.
I really do not know much code!
I’ve always enjoyed sharing my skills, experience and knowledge.
It’s probably when I’m at my best…and it definitely comes from my upbringing!
In fact, I’m the only one in my close family that isn’t a teacher.
When I started working in a corporate environment, I realized that if I learnt on the job, or from people I worked with, it was really inspiring – and it stuck!
Learning from a book, or a course that involved reading just wasn’t going to work for me – and a lot of other people like me exist.
We’d been raised to learn in a classroom like setting – it may not work for everyone or every topic, but it can form part of learning a new skill.
I personally really learn well by doing something.
So…I thought I’d see if other people felt the same.
We asked our teams how they like to learn.
Turns out being taught by an in-house expert ranks highly in their minds.
So…I gave it a go!
I’ve been running mini Skills exchange sessions to anyone who wants to come along
I’ve been at this for a while…judging by the length of my hair.
At Seccl we have a learning club, in which we share what we know. I take things a step further – in my sessions we have activities to do.
Take a step back to school.
In the usability testing session, you’ll be set against the other half of the group to find out who’s chosen website tests best.
I take the group through what usability testing is, when it can be used, the positives and negatives (hello price point!), how to write a script, we run a little taster, then we learn how to write notes during and how to write a report after.
For architecture, you bet the group are going to end up professionals in gathering data to look for organization patterns….of their bag!
What’s the point of me spending time in my work day, and then in several other people’s work day.
We sent a questionnaire to all our squads.
Turns out, confidence was pretty low.
They didn’t rate themselves as great Uxers – and that was ok.
We had a few other questions in there that gave us some useful insights – outlining a task and asking them to rate their confidence in completing that task, for example.
For T shaped teams to work, no one has to be an expert in everything.
When recently surveyed, our squads now rate themselves on average at a much higher level of confidence in User Experience over all.
Incidentally, we’ve been doing exactly the same thing with accessibility and have seen the same trend.
When you start hitting that sweet spot for confidence, you get the right questions being asked during solution design.
You get the right issues being raised, the best collaboration and sparking off each other within the teams.
these are your peers, they’ll forgive a little roughness.
In fact, it may be best to prepare as little as possible for your session.
Four bullet points about the topic you want to cover – What, Why, How, When will get you started on a great lesson plan.
If you’re a little nervous, try some reverse psychology on yourself. After all, you’ve never turned up to a session to learn something new that you didn’t want to…
Unless perhaps you’ve been on a speed awareness course recently!
I’m really passionate about user experience. Not only can I talk about it for ages - even if there is a question I don’t know the answer to, I can talk about how we could find that answer out.
Please, please please include a little practical part of your session. Many of us learn so well from actually doing something. From conducting a card sort about the contents of your bag, to using screen reading software for the first time. Plus, they’ll be able to ask you questions as they go.
I tend to schedule 45minutes in for a session that has a team activity.
DO/DO NOT LIST? Muddled.
I’ve talked mostly about sharing UX skills – but we have industry experts.
In a financial technology company, it stands to reason I’d get to learn all about finance.
The people sharing their skills are actively working and innovating in that space. The skills are up to date, of the minute.
If you find the time to allow this in to your working world, there are no other costs associated!
In past jobs and this one I have made fantastic connections that have really helped me get things done.
It’s those T shaped employees again.
If you’re the one sharing your skills, you will absolutely get that post-giving glow we all love.
