Pattern: Ongoing Education
Continuously introduce new ways and improve existing ones to help teams continually develop their cloud native knowledge and skills
The company is moving to cloud native, and some teams have never worked with cloud native technology or processes. In their previous environment, knowledge and learning were reasonably stable and linear (learn a bit and exploit the knowledge a lot).Other teams are already deep into building the cloud native platform or microservices and so have gained basic cloud native knowledge, but still are not advanced enough to support the entire transformation.
In This Context
People are joining the organization’s cloud native initiative without fully understanding the possibilities it offers or the wide variety of solutions available. New technology is introduced all the time that renders current tools and techniques out of date. When this happens, productivity suffers, and change slows down.
- Only some people are motivated to learn on their own.
- People learn better in groups.
- Formal education is more effective after some initial exposure to/experience with new information.
- Most people need to learn something a few times before they fully understand it.
- The cloud native ecosystem is changing fast.
Therefore
Build and continuously run an education program about cloud native for everyone in the company, from basic education for newly onboarded or new joiners to continuous and more advanced trainings for more experienced engineers.
- Onboarding bootcamps
- Hackathons
- Periodic knowledge updates
- Management trainings
- Online self-learning opportunities
- Books, blog posts, and other reading
- On-the-job learning by pair programming, whiteboarding, etc.
Consequently
Team knowledge is constantly refreshed and updated.
- Easy ways to roll out new information.
- A lot of inspiration arises for trying out changes.
- Developers are better able to adapt to technology shifts.
- Technology changes, which are inevitable, will be minimally disruptive since developers are better able to adapt to shifts in tech.
- By disseminating best practices and successful ways of using technology, you can replicate success and avoid missteps.
- There is cost related to frequent education.
