Anyone who works in the IT industry knows how important self-development is. Improving our competence helps us to find better solutions and to optimise our work. It is fair to say that the IT industry is constantly changing and needs to be kept up to date. For this reason, companies pay great attention to the development of their employees. In this way, they can maintain a high level of qualification of their developers.
In today’s post, we will talk about self-development. Why is this important? How it is implemented in companies.I will also tell you how it looks in Scythe Studio. Without wasting any more time, let’s get started!
Why is self-development important?
As already outlined, the IT world is constantly changing. New programming languages, frameworks and tools are appearing in the market at a swift pace. The existing ones are constantly developed and new versions appear. Some may not like it, because they have to keep up with these changes. However, the constant development is what makes this industry so interesting.
We obviously need to broaden our skills at work. A qualified employee (in the IT sector, for example, a senior developer) contributes a lot to the team. He is usually the main link in the project and it depends on him how good the final product will be.
Self-development, however, is not only limited to acquiring the necessary skills at work, but also helps us to achieve a sense of fulfilment. Setting ourselves new goals and challenges and then achieving them gives a lot of satisfaction. Probably more than once you feel pleased when something you have been working on for a long time starts to work 😉
What does self-development look like in companies?
Companies use various methods to provide their employees with constant development. The most common form is paid training. It’s advantage is that they are conducted by qualified people and that you can often get certificates after completing them. The downside is that they can be expensive and you need to plan time for them (e.g. to pass exams).
Another form is to spend a certain amount of money on training or learning materials chosen by the employee. This gives more freedom to choose the content to learn, but at the cost of less control over whether the employee actually learns something useful.
A popular option is to set aside time for the employees to learn on their own. This form certainly suits employees best, as they can adapt the form of learning to themselves (one may like to read books, while others prefer video tutorials).
How Scythe Studio do it?
In ScytheStudio we use a mix of all mentioned forms. Each employee can dedicate a selected number of hours in a month for learning a topic that interests them and that will be useful at work. If they need additional materials, the company provides them. In addition, training courses are held to develop critical skills. As a result, our specialists are familiar with the latest technologies and stand at a high level.
Another form of self-development in Scythe-Studio is the mentoring programme. Its aim is to educate younger employees under the guidance of senior developers. Employees with less experience are always assisted by experienced colleagues who always give them advice. Senior developers also benefit from this, as they can learn, for example, developers work management. It is also a great way of checking whether a senior developer has understood an topic when he can explain it to someone else. However, there are also situations when it is the other way round and sometimes it is the student who surpasses the master 😉
Last but not least are interesting projects that way develop our skills. Working on something that is interesting naturally supports our learning process. At Scythe Studio we do not only deal with commercial projects, but we also pay great attention to internal projects. One of them is SCodes library which you can read about in this article. The development of such projects allows us to create the necessary tools and gain experience and contribute to the Qt community.
Summary
That’s the end of today’s post. We have shown you the importance of self-development and how it looks like in different companies, including Scythe Studio. We hope you enjoyed this post and that you get some interesting information from it.
To stand still is to move backwards
Jakub Wincenciak
Qt Developer
