As engineering managers, it is our responsibility to foster growth for the individuals on our teams.
By identifying and addressing skills gaps, we can both enable our teams to be more effective and support individual career goals.
It’s usually much easier to identify gaps in knowledge with early-career engineers, and there’s no lack of beginner-friendly courses and books to learn from. Newer folks also often tend to be more motivated to spend extra time and energy on learning, as the delta between what they know and need to know is large, and doing nothing is uncomfortable.
But as our engineers grow in seniority, their skill gaps become harder to spot and can’t be so easily filled with online courses or books.