In my experience formalizing "learning" in the work place doesn't work because it requires the performance of learning for management types rather than real learning which involves working through real new problems over an extended period of time.
The real way to get employees to learn is to hand them responsibilities they are not fully prepared for along with the pay that goes with them and see how it goes. Right or wrong managers are rarely comfortable doing that.
Employees need to be comfortable failing in front of you and few are because there are few good examples of that turning out well. When it does go well, all too often the raise they were promised doesn't come through.
this isn't to say you're a poor manager, just that it's unusual to have a healthy environment for on the job learning.
If the entire org doesn't encourage learning, grant the time for it to happen, and protect employees from operational reprecussions of spending time learning, it is hard for individual employees to make it happen.
Reward learning with career advancement.
Send your people on relevant training courses out of the office as often as is useful/practical.
Oh and if you have timesheets make sure you can "bill" to training!
So as manager take a look and see if your environment makes people into ticket closing machines or into people who have the freedom to allocate their time where they feel it’s most useful.
Reality of course differs.
You are providing the “option” but not literally scheduling the time. Employees need cover otherwise you are “learning” but nervous something will “slip” because “Learning” isn’t business critical.
Does this apply to skills that might be more applicable to another team?
My current manager encourages learning, but shoos me away from topics that are handled by other managers. Frustratingly, he's blocked transitions of mine to other teams with work that I've found interesting and educated myself on.
How do you prioritize learning, and balance it against your interests as a manager to keep your resources focused on your objectives?
Being able to place your own work in broader context is very powerful.
Would that I could safely direct your ire to my manager.
Be seen doing it yourself.
The problem with this approach I think is you get more buy-in, but might be arguably less directly applicable to work.
Why is this a problem?
IC continuing education isn't (primarily) about having them finish reading the RFC even though they've already gleaned what they needed for their immediate problem. Rather, it's about drawing in whole new areas of knowledge. It's about keeping your deck stacked with wildcards so when you get blocked by something hard, not covered by your standard 'best-practices' you have enough diversity of experience to actually have a hope in hell of having something to draw upon for inspiration on how to solve it.
I don't see it as a problem; my boss sees it as a problem. I've tried reasoning, but without that direct connection of "what am I paying you for" it just falls of deaf ears.
Too often, companies "expect" their employees to take advantage of the fact that they allow them to learn on the job, but only reward short-term performance.
Maybe instead of having them read something, make them give a presentation on it to the rest of the team?
Then they have deadlines and produce content. Sounds just like work to me.
1. Make it part of their annual goals (e.g. attend a conference, get a certification, compete in a competition).
2. Throw them in the deep end, a little beyond their edge, and be okay if they fumble around a bit.
3. Make them teach. Give them stuff to understand and present to your team or other teams. That forcing function will give them a mechanism to immediately exercise their newfound knowledge/skill.
4. Make room in your project schedules for it. They'll learn on their own if they have the time, or they'll invent something. The ones that don't are your bottom tier.
My first boss sent me to Siggraph my first year to drink from the fire hose. He also asked me, on my first day, what I was worst at of all the areas of programming I was aware of (Windows UI) and assigned me three months of work writing custom controls... I did it in six months, and I've never been able to thank him enough for teaching me, right off the bat, that your people are your greatest investment, that optimizing for the project is rarely the right choice.
So the solution is to make it clear you pay them to learn.
That's a great idea in theory because tackling a real world problem tends to motivate towards a real world solution.
However, learning invariably encompasses failure which rarely measures up well with typical (if arguably useful/useless) performance metrics that developers contend with.
I was referring to the potential for a metric that could backfire in the context of a performance review. (And that'd be a relatively tame surprise in one of those god-forsaken events...)
Training is on there (with a 5% of time budget for it), and if they don't achieve their objectives, their next appraisal will go badly. Pay rises and promotions and so on depend on good appraisals, and I anticipate some quarterly review meetings in which I tell people that they're on track to do badly because they're not meeting their training objectives.
If having their training objectives written in black and white, and being reviewed quarterly and appraised annually on whether or not they're meeting their objectives doesn't make it "okay", well, I guess I'll have to come up with something else, but I sure hope that will make it clear.
Learning must be optional, never required. And must have incentive: I learn programming because it makes my work faster. But if I can't use my program, I feel like I wasted my time.
Learning should tell me that I am increasing my value.
I can never learn new stuff just because I am supposed to. Nor will anyone suffer a book if there is no IMMEDIATE benefit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763789
Having an actual story to back the learning process might help making employees feel more comfortable with it.
Once the goals align, it will become clear to everyone that employees must both have deep understanding of the current company and an eye towards the future.
That said, as a manager I find it hard to get direct reports to accept sometimes that it is not only okay, but required, by me that they learn new things. I do what I can to encourage it, offer to buy books for people, give time to do online course work, etc. They often complain that they don’t feel like they are “Working” even though I explain to them that as long as its work/business related I will expect to be able to call upon them in the future with this new knowledge.
So what can I do as a manager to make it more “okay” to spend time at work learning?