How can robotics leaders develop their team's skills?

Team's needs assessment is crucial for team lead. Especially finding bottlenecks and discussing solutions to it. Sometimes it could be the missing expertise or resource bottleneck. However, having clear discussion are helpful for successful project.

Robotics leaders are vital to enhancing their team's skills and promoting continual learning. Leaders can assess existing skills, develop personalised training plans, promote continuous learning and knowledge sharing, provide hands-on experience, invest in professional development programmes, foster collaboration and teamwork, recognise and reward achievements, focus on soft skills development, stay informed about industry trends, and lead by example. Technical expertise, soft skills, and robotics domain knowledge can be assessed to discover opportunities for improvement. Individualised training regimens can be created depending on team members' talents, shortcomings, and career goals.

When developing a commercial robotic system, the key aspect to consider is differentiation. Ensure your team has a different and complementary skill set within the area you want to focus on. If you want to focus on robot motion, for example, ensure you have robot control engineers, motion planning specialists and perception specialists. Make sure to have software engineers in the team to curate the code quality and integration aspect of the system. Experienced robotics engineers area scarse commodity in the labour market, consider having a couple of technically minded phds in the team to solve the hardest problems. As for the split software/robotics engineers, make sure to have majority of robotics engineers able to write quality code

Robotics leaders can empower their teams by setting precise and attainable skill development objectives. Once the team's strengths and weaknesses are assessed, establish SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). For instance, if your team lacks proficiency in computer vision for autonomous robots, a SMART goal could be: "Within six months, each team member will complete an online computer vision course, demonstrating improved object recognition accuracy by 20% in our robot's visual system." These targeted goals ensure skill enhancement aligns with the team's mission and enhances project outcomes.

Robotics is an emerging technology, things are not standardised and are in rapid evolution, chronically lacking dedicated engineering conferences, as it happens with other topics like enterprise systems or embedded systems for example. You will need to obtain the best you can from academic research, ensuring you have someone that can attend them and present them back in a digestible format. Don’t underestimate also access to more traditional software topics, which they exist in a range of different media. For those engineers will need to be mindful of discerning what is relevant from what is superfluous for the task at hand

As a professor in the robotics space, there are dozens of diverse and often free or inexpensive trainings for those wishing to develop their skills in the robotics field. By working with your team to come up with a learning plan through a multitude of media, the possibilities for growing your team's skillsets are as diverse as you want to make them. By helping them focus on the areas of robotics that interest them, as well as what is useful for your company, you can increase the value of your employees skillsets, while also increasing their happiness.

I had a manager that was clear we were allowed to use 1 hour a day to work on a project completely unrelated to our deliverables. The idea was you could learn new relevant skills by working on a pet-project (even if it had no relation to work projects). For example a team member worked on a robotic chicken coop door with a web Interface to open and then close at night. Irrelevant to our day jobs.. But the skills were incredibly relevant, and within a year our tiny team had the skillset of a team 50% larger. Recognizing that upskilling is not free, but is a worthwhile investment in your team, is the first step to improving your team's skills.