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For Managers: How to develop your tech skills

In a previous post, I’ve covered the importance of investing time to keep your tech skills up-to-date. In this post, I’d like to share a few ways to achieve that. I’ve tried a few of them in the past and they’ve worked for me. A few other ones seem interesting and worthwhile to give them a chance. I’ve taken into account the time constraints for managers when curating the following list.

Hackathons

More and more companies have been using hackathons as tools to drive innovation, build teamwork, and improve internal processes. Even though the target audience is usually the Software development team, managers should leverage those opportunities to get their hands dirty and brush up those coding skills. Since those events usually last only a few days, managers have a better chance to be able to put aside some of their day-to-day tasks to focus on those hackathons.

Lunch & Learn

Knowledge sharing is continuously happening among the team members, but managers quite often are not involved in those discussions. Lunch & Learn sessions are effective methods to share knowledge across different functional areas. If you’re a manager and that’s not a common practice in your company, that’s an opportunity for you to develop your team and, as a side-effect, to get to know what the team has been working on from a technical perspective.

Meetups

Meetup.com provides an amazing and free platform to know what’s going on in your area. Since I moved to the US in 2014, I’ve been a big fan of Meetups, but I have been participating only in project management or Agile groups. Recently I’ve given a chance to DevOps meetups and they turned out to be quite handy. In addition, those Meetups can be a useful channel to share open positions, if you’re hiring people.

Local Conferences

As a manager, you may be challenged to justify why you should attend a development/DevOps/… conference that can easily costs $2-3k when including registration, flights, and hotel. In addition, if you need to travel, the amount of out-of-office time can impact your other management tasks.

As an alternative, if you find a local conference that costs only a few hundred dollars, you have a better chance to convince your organization that a couple of days per year are worthwhile and will not impact much your other duties.

Online courses

E-learning platforms like Coursera or Udemy are the go-to options for many people since they can pace their courses as they prefer. However, online course incompletion rates can be as high as 85+%. I’d recommend not to enroll in more than one course at a time to improve your chance to actually complete them.

Certifications

My opinion about certifications may seem a bit contradictory. Even though I have several certifications, I really don’t care about the actual certifications. The most important outcome of any certification is learning during the process. A certification is just a clear finish line that helps me to get organized and commit to studying. Even better if the certification exam voucher has an expiration date. 🙂

If you take major cloud providers as examples, they provide entry-level certifications (foundational or associate) that cover enough technical fundaments for a manager. Google Cloud Associate certifications are recommended for people with 6+ months of experience, while AWS certifications have foundational (~6 months of experience) and associate (~1 year of experience) paths.

Personal projects

Another approach that requires more discipline but that’s very effective is to define a personal project and implement it. It could be as simple as a to-do mobile app for you and your spouse to share chores. Addressing a personal problem can be the extra motivation you need to get that going.

As a piece of advice based on previous failed attempts to do this, keep that as simple as possible and work on incremental releases. If you can’t complete that within a week, reduce the scope until it fits in that timespan.

Contribute to existing projects

You can easily find an open-source project that’s interesting, but the most interesting ones are also likely to require a massive ramp-up time even for small contributions (bug fixes, test automation, …). If that’s a path you want to take, shoot for tiny GitHub projects (less than 2k lines of code), look at their backlogs of known issues, fork it and try to get a few bugs fixed. Here’s another neat idea to get started.

Another way is to find new projects looking for collaborators. A convenient platform for that purpose is FindCollabs. You could even bring that platform to your company as the official way to engage people interested in working on side projects.

Final tips

With such a breadth of options to develop your tech skills, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you need to be laser-focused on what you want and avoid biting off more than you can chew. Enjoy your journey and, most importantly, have fun while learning.

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