HERE Technologies Career Growth & Development

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

We recognize that it is important for everybody to learn and grow. The company organizes a week-long annual HERE Learning Festival, which comprises a plethora of talks on a variety of business-related topics, with some deep dives into specific technologies. All the employees are invited to allocate some time to attend or at least access the meeting recordings. Sometimes, an online “brown bag” meeting is also organized by a specific team. We can then learn about different approaches to problems and technologies from our colleagues, possibly incorporating some of our findings into our direct team’s work.

It often happens that we stumble upon something interesting during our daily work or just want to share our way of working with other teammates. During internal Tech Review meetings with a targeted audience, we share our work item solving process, disseminating good practices within the team faster than what can be accomplished through a code review. We can also access a range of online courses, allowing individuals to learn at their own pace. Having such a multi-tier learning structure helps everyone identify inspiring and useful pieces of knowledge in their daily routine.

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

In this way, we can leverage the potential of every team member. In particular, this reduces the bottleneck of someone being stuck on a problem for too long, as we also have an open team space, where we can ask questions if we encounter something problematic. Within our frequent standups and Tech Reviews, we are also made aware of specific team members’ areas of expertise, so we can also reach out to them directly for help.

For example, by attending an AWS course, I was able to better understand the solutions used in templated deployments. This helped develop extra tools for observability, making issue investigations much easier than before.

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

It’s important to give engineers some time to learn and even encourage them to allocate some time to it, apart from their daily tasks. It is also a good idea to have these internal Tech Reviews, so that good practices and interesting new technology applications can be shared.

Finally, it is essential to have an open space for every team member to ask questions when something is unclear without being judged. More experienced team members can lead the way so that newer team members are also presented with a space open to learning.