Why Professional Development?
Professional Development (PD) is vital to SEP’s business and culture.
- PD keeps us current and able to win new projects
- PD improves our ability to deliver software to clients
- PD helps us to continuous grow and improve our own abilities
- PD allows us to explore new ideas, tools, and techniques
It is our responsibility to seek out new ideas from across our industry, dive deep and evaluate how we can use these ideas to improve our work and company. We find these ideas in books, conferences, blogs, courses, and many other ways. We have the freedom to explore areas that interest us personally.
Why a Professional Development System?
It is important to separate the core concepts of PD from a system surrounding PD. A system surrounding Professional Development:
- gives us a reminder of expectations
- provides structure and guidelines
- allows for crowd curation of PD
- fosters collaboration around PD
- invites and facilitates sharing
We want our engineering culture to be built on sharing. When someone has a problem, we help each other solve it even if they are not on our project. We share our successes and failures so that others can learn from our past experiences. In the same vein, when someone learns or discovers something awesome, we want to share it across the company so that we can make each other better.
Why PDv2?
We have reflected upon the last few years of PD under the old system and we can see what worked well and what can be improved. Based on the tenets defined above, the old PDU system does not meet all of our needs. We want to experiment with new viewpoints and methodologies to reduce friction when discussing, recording, and performing PD. Our new system will likely look and behave differently from the old system, but at its heart is still the core concept of improving individuals to improve the company as a whole. We are currently working with a group of beta testers to validate our assumptions and build a better system. Those outside the beta team can continue to enter PD through the traditional means. Look forward to updates on our progress as we roll out the new system to our beta testers.
