When to start L&D as a tech company
People value Learning and Development (L&D). It is an important part of careers and can accelerate an individual, team, or company to the next level. There is a great Return On Investment (ROI) to be realised.?Good L&D is also important for responding and growing in the ever-changing world.
But many tech companies struggle with the most important question: When do you start? AND What type of L&D should you do?
Note: this guide is a basic “rule-of-thumb” for fast-growing tech companies, but may contain some interesting points for companies outside of that space. Also, there are many companies that don’t comply with these rules-of-thumb and are still very successful.?
What are the key benefits when starting L&D?
Standardisation
L&D standardises the way of working across a company. It is a way of telling people “This is how we expect you to behave”. On a very practical level, it brings control and enables founders, execs and leaders to set expectations and define not just want they want to be done but how they want it done.
Expectations on “how they think”
Are you a company that requires people to conform to specific processes due to legal/ regulatory requirements? Or do you want to “move fast and break things?” Training provides guidance on behaviours and mindset.?
Importantly, the role of data is defined as part of training. It is the gateway to building data literacy.?
Remember, we are not just talking about formal training. Every time a CEO gives a talk at an all hands, they are communicating what they believe is important.?
Building an internal language to disagree and still progress
Saying or hearing “no”? is rough. How can people disagree yet move things forward quickly? It sounds obvious, but this can trip up a growing company very easily.
An example is when a new function or role is created. A common occurrence in a growing company. The new role causes a ripple effect based on the question: Who is responsible for what? People will disagree.
Ensures your people continue to grow,?
Growing companies offer a range of benefits, including amazing learning opportunities. Google has a 70:20:10 rule: 70% of learning is done “on the job”, away from training sessions. 10% is obtained through formal training sessions, where acquiring knowledge is the primary goal. The other 20% is obtained through formal practice.
Training provides base knowledge from which to build. It allows people to accelerate their learning.?
There is an old saying when it comes to L&D:
“What happens if we invest in our people and they leave?” CFO
“What happens if we don’t invest in them and they stay?” CEO
The types of L&D:
Technical skills
This is the first thing most people think of when it comes to L&D. Technical skills are constantly changing. New technology and tools are continuously coming out (e.g. ChatGPT).
Investing in these skills ensures people have the technical skills needed to do their job, it also shows them that you want them to stay at your company. Keeping your team up to date technically is crucial to keep up with the competition.?
Keep in mind technical training is best learned by doing, so let the team try (not necessarily all at once). They read documentation, try in a sandbox environment, and then try and real situation.?
How to start technical training?
The world is full of training platforms that offer this type of training. However, the best way to get technical training started is through internal knowledge sharing.?
Spend an hour on Fridays with someone presenting something interesting they have done or are working on. Delve into the details. Share the core, base knowledge. You will be surprised how much knowledge is stored internally.?
Process knowledge
Process knowledge is a big one for large companies but also important for smaller ones. Process knowledge is the “how we work” knowledge. It can cover internal processes, such as how to submit expenses, book vacations or how to onboard someone.?
One of the biggest confusions we see is regarding Sales. Sales is a process, pure and simple. Top salespeople have a very defined process, including specific language to use. People often confuse sales as “soft skills”, but it is a process. Listening, asking questions and personalising your sales pitch are all processes.?
There are entire companies focused on teaching this process. Winning by Design and Gong.io both offer amazing insights.
How to start process training?
Soft-skills
Soft-skills are often ignored, especially in the tech industry. However, there is no denying they are critical. Emphasis on learning and development of soft skills early is important because they help with many other skills. The issues with soft skills often manifest around how people deal with being told “no”. Saying or hearing “no” is tough, especially when it stops any movement/ stuff getting done.?
How to start soft-skills training?
Start with trying to define what it means to work at your company. Whenever I speak with companies trying to start with training for managers, etc, I start by asking about what it is like to work at the company.
You don’t need to write the cultural statements on the wall but build them into your own language. Ask others to do the same. If you can’t, then the cultural values/ statements are wrong.?
Data-literacy
Many tech companies will say they are “data-driven”, but if you actually look beyond the surface, you’ll find that internally, they often don’t even know what data they have, what to look at, or how to process it.
Spending some time early building data literacy and independent data analysis skills empowers people.?
There are also layers of literacy. Everyone should have basic literacy. However, some teams will need the next layer down, and others, including data scientists, will require raw data access. The more important data is, the more complex setup may be involved.?
How to start data literacy training?
The sooner you start this, the easier it is.?
Defining KPIs is critical. My training at PwC Consulting said people can only manage 3-5 KPIs. More than that, it becomes noise and just confuses people. A company should have one set of master KPIs with all other KPIs rolled into those somehow. One of the master KPIs should be your “north star” metric. The north star defines what you really prioritise.
Be careful how you define your metrics. Something else I learnt at PwC Consulting: Ask any accountant, and they will tell you there is more than one way to count something, including revenue and profit.?This is very true for KPIs.
Note: Ongoing data literacy will require you to revisit this topic every 6-12 months and make progress on building understanding. e.g. Something as simple as “Weekly Active Users” (WAUs) will need better definitions as you grow. e.g. how to deal with internal users, testers, trial accounts etc.?
What happens when people start formal L&D?
In my experience, there are a few major things that start to occur once a company begins formal L&D training, regardless of the type of training and regardless if they have a full-time L&D manager.
Lots of defining
Defining roles, capabilities, career paths, etc. Everything starts to get written down. This helps a lot.?Doing it too early is wasteful. Waiting until too late will be painful and people will disagree.
Skill mapping
Now that you have defined everything, you need to understand what skills people currently have.?
People will be asked to rate themselves against skills. We do it at OYA as part of our onboarding process for new clients. We need to find out what people are good at, and where needs more attention to develop.?Learning what you HAVE is important to understanding what you NEED.
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Incentives - formal and informal
Along with definitions and mapping against those definitions come incentives to move up/ upskill. They will either come formally or informally. People will start to pay attention to what is required to get a promotion/ raise/ bonus. So be careful what you put in place. Don’t just sign off on it and think “it will be ok”.
Beware: “What gets measured gets managed”. Especially when it comes to L&D. Someone may put in place some KPI that is more about being busy or “completing” courses/ lessons but not actually learning. “Busy learning” does not help.?Just the same way as busy work is not productivity.
When to start L&D depends on the company's size.
There are always ways to delay the decision, but it spreads the burden out over a group of people. It “hides” the work being done. Hiding work means company leadership doesn’t know what is going on. Decisions made based on bad data normally lead to bad outcomes.?
Note: These numbers are "company size" not team/ department size.
Company size: <15 people
At this point, the company is founder(s) led, and their personality and time looms over everything and anything. Training is done on a “as needed” basis. Internal processes are agreed as they arise.?
When a company is less than around 15 people, training options are very dependent on the margins of the business. Small, highly profitable companies (e.g. law firms) with highly skilled employees do invest in training. Low-margin businesses (inc. SaaS) don’t have the scale to do anything.?
Tech companies at this stage normally struggle to be able to financially afford formal L&D. The learning instead is replaced by on-the-job learning when needed. It is still a “sink or swim” moment.?
Company size: 15-20 people is when most companies can start thinking about technical training. Before this, there is really not enough room/ budget to do continuous training.?
Data literacy also starts to become an issue here as people start to ask questions or disagree about a KPI, how it is measured, etc.?
This is also when questions about levels start to really be solidified. The difference between a VP, director and manager are usually informally defined now, to be codified later.?
The bottom line: Technical training and data literacy need to start around this time.?
Company size: 20-30 people. When a company grows to this size and is growing, a HR professional is often hired. In fast, high-growth companies, this HR person is exclusively focused on hiring, onboarding and day-to-day management. Sometimes this person is given the title of “office manager” or something similar. When this happens, they become the catch-all role for anything people-related.?
Bringing on someone to start the HR function brings a different set of challenges:
“I need to hire 3 engineers” is what a CTO says, but the HR person needs to write down and understand exactly what type of engineers they have (i.e. job descriptions).?
What people often miss is that HR people like to define and document things as it makes their job a lot easier.?
This will start to standardise processes, such as onboarding. Other processes will begin to become more formalised.?
This is the start of process training.?
Company size: 50-100 people is when the pain of lack of soft skill training starts. When people/ companies do anything about it is a whole different story.?
People will start to be promoted from within. They will usually receive no training in their new role (outside of some basic process training such as “this is how you approve leave”). If you are not careful, a newly promoted manager will realise they don't want to climb the corporate ladder and want to go back to being an individual contributor.
This stage is when founders tend to have a moment when they discover someone who works for the company, but they’ve never met them before. It always happens and can be a very scary moment for a founder. Their direct, personal connection is gone. Their leadership style needs to adapt.?
Companies normally start to really formalise their capabilities/ role definitions at this stage.?
In an ideal world, this is also when companies begin to think about topics like soft skill training and manager training. Sometimes this will be outsourced to a small training company, but in-person training workshops can be expensive.?
150 people: the Dunbar tribe: In 1993, Robin Dunbar theorised that humans could have no more than about 150 meaningful relationships. This is known as the “tribe” number. Since his original work, many companies have found that shortly after passing this number, a company begins to change as it becomes impossible to “know everyone”. It has significant cultural implications. It also represents a big shift in control and management.?
Company size: 150-250 people: Many tech companies start to think about hiring a full-time person to do training somewhere around 150-250.?There is a HR department, and questions start to get asked about "how can we do this better".
Company size: >250 people. Some companies blow past this number without giving L&D a single thought. Those who do are doing many things that delay the pain setting in. This can especially be the case when founders are still big personalities internally and draw a lot of attention.
Organisational complexity will start to cause problems. Many leaders' instincts are to try and tighten control, effectively killing many of the key cultural items that helped the company grow. Processes will be introduced to manage the large teams now present.
Common pitfalls when starting L&D
There are normally some things that go wrong, so here are the most common pitfalls to avoid.
The later the start, the more difficult the beginning
While there are many companies that delay doing anything L&D related, starting late has its own issues. Starting earlier, even on a small scale is better.
Data literacy is especially difficult to “catch up” on as it can require important infrastructure and early decision-making. Starting late can require hiring a senior (and expensive) person who needs to spend 6-12 months just getting everything in order.?
Directly lifting from corporate processes often doesn’t work at a smaller scale.
This is a big misstep, and it creates a lot of problems. It is the #1 reason small companies throw their hands up in the air and give up on L&D. The learning & development needs of a 5000-person company are very different from a 50-person company. Big companies invest heavily in training their people, so why can’t smaller companies take advantage of that training structure?
Hiring someone from a big corporation who will bring in their processes/ training experience can seem very appealing. There can be some large benefits from such a hire. That is why fast-growing tech companies frequently hire from big corporations such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Microsoft, etc. These corporate people also desire a change to a more noble organisation.?
The problem: Managers with this background have the potential to overcomplicate things. They add unnecessary layers to decision-making. It is not always the case, but effective onboarding and training can help prevent this issue.?
It is good to use big corporations as a guide and a good idea to recruit from them if possible. However, always remember it is a guide, not a rulebook. Be your own company and remain nimble.
Ignoring developing your own language/ way
Founders love to define what it means to be part of a company. But at some point, they need to hand over control of developing that culture to the people.?
Developing a good language is critical to building a successful organisation. One of the other parts of internal language that needs to be developed is how to say “no”, and still move forward.?
A good example of how "no" is important is related to how data is used. “We are data-driven” is a common one and a personal favourite. KPIs will be posted around and talked about. But to be truly data-driven, a high level of data literacy is required at all levels. The CEO has to be able to get out of the way of lower-level people making data-driven decisions. If people are not prepared to hear NO, then they instead of using data to discover, they use data to justify their pre-formed opinion. Data-justified is not the same as data-driven.?
Forming how to say NO is a challenge in itself. One CEO I’ve spoken with described the issues around giving a deadline, then having it passed down the chain only to have the developer see the scope of work and say it was impossible to hit. That NO flowed back up the communication chain to the CEO. Valuable time was wasted going back and forth. Everyone, including the CEO, had to learn ways of dealing with these difficult discussions.?
Excluding Risk and Innovation from job descriptions
Many founders believe that they are the next Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs or (insert any household big name in tech).?
Empowering people and teams can be an extremely scary topic for founders, execs and leaders. It means giving up control and letting other people have the big ideas. (e.g. Steve Jobs was very sceptical of the iPhone concept, but others persuaded him)?
Building innovation and risk-taking into frameworks, job descriptions, and capabilities ensures people think about how they are managing these things.?
Remember, what gets measured gets managed. Part of the learning will be “those ideas are bad”. But it is something people have to go through.?
Supercell , the mobile game company, is a great example of a company that includes risk-taking and innovation as part of its capabilities framework.?
Conclusion
Learning and development can unlock the potential of any team, even an average one. A champion team normally trumps a team of champions.?
It’s easier to start than most people think. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or time, but the benefits can be realised easily. All you have to do is try.