UncommonX Career Growth & Development

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

A strong culture of learning is critical to the success of any firm. Learning covers both external knowledge and internal knowledge. Externally, large language models are transforming the IT industry and almost every industry, while development frameworks are constantly being updated, new vulnerabilities and exploits are surfacing, and we’ve seen revolutionary technologies like bitcoin arise. Internally, as each department adapts to the shifting market forces, there must be knowledge-sharing throughout the organization to keep everyone pulling in the same direction and delighting customers. 

Here at UncommonX, we work to embed a culture of learning into everything we do. Employees are encouraged to attend vendor events and take advantage of any networking opportunities available, and specific courses and certifications are covered by the company. Quarterly, we meet as a full company where there are four to five 30-minute demos of current products and technologies being worked on and/or emerging technologies being researched. Also, as a team, we review each prospect engagement, either successful or unsuccessful, for areas where we can improve and learn from our missteps. 

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

The biggest impact that a culture of learning has on employees is that they feel they are progressing in their career. We want our employees to view UncommonX as a place where they can grow and evolve. We look for confident, self-motivated individuals who are committed to a career of continuous learning. This has led to us having a very low rate of employee attrition. Our learning culture allows us to continually deploy products using the latest cutting-edge technologies. Gathering feedback from customer engagements allows us to see shifts in the market and continue to develop and deploy solutions that our customers desire.

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Communication is critical. Leaders need to have open and collaborative dialogue with their employees to understand their career goals and articulate the culture of the team and company. Leaders need to be willing to allow employees a percentage of their time to attend training, events or just exploring something new. Junior employees should feel empowered to share knowledge with their more experienced peers. It is also important that employees are given some room to fail. Not every new endeavor will be a success. But whether it’s a success or failure, there can always be lessons learned and fed back in the continuous improvement loop.