When the going gets tough, the tough get training

In times of economic uncertainty, one of the first things to get cut and last to get reinstated is the training budget. Upskilling staff is often perceived as an unjustifiable expense. A luxury, an extra, a perk only to be rolled out during the good times.

Yet team members who feel invested in with up-to-the-moment skills are likely to be the catalyst for the growth of your business.

Make learning a habit

Whether you are a military unit, a dance troupe, a sports team, or a rock band, training is the way to become match fit or performance-ready. For any team, the results you achieve have a direct correlation to the practice you put it.

At Clearleft we have a long-standing culture of learning. It’s one of the things that personally appealed to me before working here and has carried on since.

One of our values is ‘Learn and share. Share and learn’. This gets lived out in numerous ways:

• We put on prestigious conferences from the recent remote SofaConf to UX London, Leading Design and dConstruct.
• Our practitioners coach students on digital design courses, this year running sessions pre-lockdown at Ravensbourne University London and remotely at the University of Greenwich.
• You’ll find us involved with and regularly talking at meetup groups such as Codebar, Ladies that UX and nUXers Brighton.

So what can you do when training budgets are frozen and your team are working remotely?

Here are three ideas for some cost-efficient but still effective ways to engage and upskill your digital team.

1. Start with a list

There’s no shortage of useful training materials online, much of which is free. More often, the challenge is narrowing down what to learn and then finding quality resources to use.

To give yourself focus, ask your team for a long list of their learning objectives. Get them to review their development plans and to plunder any bookmarks and lists of topics they have identified. Go broad and go big.

Once you have a longlist ask the team to prioritise a selection. It’s useful to get the team to think about the skills to polish up on now that will be useful to improve the quality of their upcoming work. Don’t think too far into the future.

We recently ran three remote training sessions for a global software company. The first two sessions covered product design and research techniques which had been identified as areas for training. However, we purposefully left the agenda for the third session unspecified so the participants could decide what they wanted additional coaching in. Giving the team a say was a powerful way to empower them in the development of their skills.

Armed with your list of potential training topics, start to curate the resources to use. Now, this doesn’t have to be as daunting as it might sound.

Three ways to quickly find quality content are:

• Ask for recommendations from the team, your network and from the hive mind on social media.
• Think about who you know who you could offer to do a reciprocal skills swop with.
• Pay a person or company to curate a list of bespoke material for you based on your requirements.

Creating a calendar of training sessions will help your staff develop the habit of training and for you to ensure there is a variety of both topics and delivery styles.

2. Training together but apart

Going to a conference, sitting in an auditorium and listening to a speaker was as much about being part of a shared experience with the audience around you.

To (almost) replicate this remotely, set a time and place for your team to collectively watch or listen to a presentation and then discuss it afterwards. This is most effective when everyone is consuming the media at the same time and even better if the follow-on discussion or activities have some structure. Zoom, Meet, Teams are all ideal for streaming talks and collectively conversing afterwards.

As a starting point, if you want some inspiration dive into the Clearleft video archive.

On Clearleft’s Vimeo channel, you’ll find 178 videos from the conferences we organise. You’ll find amazing talks covering a vast swathe of topics from Leading Design, UX London, Patterns Day and Ampersand.

Alternatively, the audio archive from 10 years of dConstruct is an audio treasure trove of 3390 minutes of insightful thinking from the brightest minds in the digital design industry.

3. Give some training

Another idea is instead of receiving training why not give some training? Every project team I’ve worked in – both agency colleagues and client’s teams – have such untapped potential to teach something useful to their teammates.

At Clearleft we have a range of formats for sharing tips and advice.

At the end of the week wind-down, people are encouraged to show and tell project work, demo tools and share techniques that they’ve been using. It’s informal, short and requires little preparation.

Up a level from this, we regularly hold brown bags. These have continued even whilst working remotely. The format is simple. Over lunch, someone will talk through something of interest. The eclectic nature of the talks keeps the format interesting.

Some examples of sessions include project teams giving highlights of their projects, Cassie recently walked through the rebuild of her SVG animation rich website, we had clients from the Natural History Museum talk about what goes on behind the exhibition halls and a designer from OpenTable showing us their process for A/B testing.

Getting a little more formal we also do longer form training sessions within the team. These provide the opportunity for someone to provide a more considered or in-depth presentation on a topic. Recent subjects have included facilitation skills for running remote workshops, and a run through by Katie of a talk she gave on service design at Future London Academy.

The value of training

Ongoing training is vital in maintaining and developing a highly-skilled team. The rate of change in how digital products and services are delivered benefits teams who adopt a culture of continuous learning.

Training doesn’t need to be expensive to provide value to both staff and the business.

In the current climate of forced remote work, and the potentially isolating effect this can have, training offers an opportunity to bring your team together to collectively and collaboratively develop skills together.