March 4, 2022

When looking around at our team, we saw that we had an abundance of experience on a wide variety of topics that would benefit us all as engineers if we could share. It would be great to be taught the skills that our coworkers have mastered, but the limited time, resources and limited support available make this infeasible. Also, there are already great resources online that we can use to become educated in these topics, but these resources do not always translate into useful information. Our solution to this problem was implementing the Learn, Create, Teach initiative. This is a company-wide initiative leveraging PeachyHR where we can all create courses on topics we have mastered to share our knowledge and become better engineers!

Learn revolves around following four courses a month. This portion of our initiative aims to provide a foundation for said courses, leaving a jumping-off point for students to commence individual studies. These courses are created by your peers, course topics are chosen based on team interest, therefore every course should have some appeal from the get-go. With 9 other creators creating 1 course a month this leaves a 5-course surplus each month, thus our course catalog is eternally growing, increasing user learning options with each iteration. Each course's outcomes should be met, slowly leveling the technical playing field for the whole team as peers start to converge on content knowledge.

Create is the next part of our initiative, which involves creating a course on Peachy, and the expectation is to come up with one course within the month to add to our program. When creating courses, we have full reign over deciding what topics to cover, what resources to use, and whether we want to curate custom content specific to our team. As mentioned before, there are a lot of resources available online that will provide an abundance of knowledge for our topics, but understanding what resources are most valuable and worth looking through can be ambiguous when you are not familiar with the topic. So when creating courses, linking quality content from the internet is a great way to keep quality information in one place. Youtube videos are the most linked for these courses due to how easy they allow us to absorb content. Custom content is also an approach many have taken, whether through videos or blog posts discussing these topics. These custom blog posts often incorporate situations that specifically involve processes that we employ. By the end of every month, we will have a sizable backlog of content that our peers can learn from.

Teach encompasses supporting created courses, providing “Lunch and Learns,” one-on-ones, and additional resources for requesting students. Additionally, each course’s feedback criteria is discussed and actioned to evaluate if course outcomes were met, what deficiencies were observed, and how the learning material could be improved. Through establishing course criteria and learning outcomes, we gain two primary benefits;

1. We gain metrics to sort/compile courses with
2. We have the benefit of gamifying course creation, as creators try to attract higher scores and attain a greater course following

The approach we have taken to setting up Learn, Create, Teach is to involve the whole team in our process of choosing specific topics and updates. We run a meeting every month where everyone goes over the courses they have taken and the things they have learned. Our peers will also come up with two or more topics that they are interested in producing courses on, and the rest of the team votes on which topics they would be most interested in taking. This way, we know that we have an audience for these courses.

The outcome of this initiative is a team that will learn from each other and become smarter and better engineers every month, which will greatly contribute to the quality of code they are writing and solutions they are providing. The following chart shows the progression of lessons and courses from our first iteration.

Peachy allows the Learn, Create, Teach initiative to flourish. With infrastructure that allows you to publish courses that are available to the rest of your organization, creating courses is as easy as linking/uploading your content and ordering your topics.

The Learn, Create, Teach dashboard is another great addition that allows us to view the status of everyone’s numbers for the month and see what courses everyone is learning. Peachy's Learning Logs support adding material that is not sufficient for an entire course load, but still adds to the team's technical expertise.

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