Ask HN: What tech companies have great learning and development teams?

2 points by scottdgibson 11 years ago | 4 comments

I have always had a passion for learning and development, fostered through my time in the Navy in the Nuclear Engineering field.

However, I stayed away from L&D in the corporate world because of the general bad reputation they always seemed to have (in HR...just 'trainers not educators, not technical, etc.)

At Rackspace, for quite some time, I ran a portion of the product org building OpenStack products/services before moving officially into L&D and built a 31 person global L&D team. I would say the success of the team was having an entrepreneurial mindset (learning experiences, NOT training) and having a team that understood the tech.

So, here's the question: What tech companies have great L&D teams and why? I want to understand what makes them great and hopefully collaborate.

Thank you!!!!

walterbell 11 years ago |

This expertise may also be found in technical marketing or developer relations teams.

It's worth exploring the business models which justify the creation of "learning" content, e.g. why does YC fund HN? DigitalOcean created devops/admin tutorials to increase demand for low-cost VPS at shared-hosting price points.

Do Minecraft, makeup & other How-To videos (advertising biz model) on YouTube count? If companies could earn YouTube revenue for high-quality training videos (general principles + product specifics), would this increase overall supply of quality self-learning material?

scottdgibson 11 years ago | |

I think I am more interested in the 'internal' customer. While the training you mention would certainly benefit internal and external, internal customers have a wider set of needs to sell and more importantly, support the products and services. Also, think about the broad technology knowledge need to build and support the actual products, etc.

How do they help people grow in their roles? Transition to new roles that they aren't currently skilled to perform?

walterbell 11 years ago | | |

Here's a VC post about forward-looking companies, note that these are usually large and deep pocketed enough to invest in internal development. Less well-off companies sometimes resort to hiring new people.

http://www.tomtunguz.com/continuing-education-picasso/

hkarthik 11 years ago |

Developer Relations is really a good place to go. Google is hiring a lot of folks for their Cloud Platform to help evangelize. I would recommend check them out.