OPS03-BP06 Team members are encouraged to maintain and grow their skill sets
Teams must grow their skill sets to adopt new technologies, and to support changes in demand and responsibilities in support of your workloads. Growth of skills in new technologies is frequently a source of team member satisfaction and supports innovation. Support your team members' pursuit and maintenance of industry certifications that validate and acknowledge their growing skills. Cross train to promote knowledge transfer and reduce the risk of significant impact when you lose skilled and experienced team members with institutional knowledge. Provide dedicated structured time for learning.
AWS provides resources, including the
AWS Getting Started Resource Center
Resources such as
Support
AWS also shares best practices and patterns that we have learned
through the operation of AWS in
The
Amazon Builders' Library
AWS Training and
Certification
Desired outcome: Your organization constantly evaluates skill gaps and closes them with structured budget and investment. Teams encourage and incentivize their members with upskilling activities such as acquiring leading industry certifications. Teams take advantage of dedicated cross-sharing knowledge programs such as lunch-and-learns, immersion days, hackathons, and gamedays. Your organization's keeps its knowledge systems up-to-date and relevant to cross-train team members, including new-hire onboarding trainings.
Common anti-patterns:
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In the absence of a structured training program and budget, teams experience uncertainty as they try to keep pace with technology evolution, which results in increased attrition.
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As part of migrating to AWS, your organization demonstrates skill gaps and varying cloud fluency amongst teams. Without an effort to upskill, teams find themselves overtasked with legacy and inefficient management of the cloud environment, which causes increased operator toil. This burn out increases employee dissatisfaction.
Benefits of establishing this best practice: When your organization consciously invests in improving the skills of its teams, it also helps accelerate and scale cloud adoption and optimization. Targeted learning programs drive innovation and build operational ability for teams to be prepared to handle events. Teams consciously invest in the implementation and evolution of best practices. Team morale is high, and team members value their contribution to the business.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: Medium
Implementation guidance
To adopt new technologies, fuel innovation, and keep pace with changes in demand and responsibilities to support your workloads, continually invest in the professional growth of your teams.
Implementation steps
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Use structured cloud advocacy programs: AWS Skills Guild
provides consultative training to increase cloud skill confidence and igniting culture of continuous learning. -
Provide resources for education: Provided dedicated, structured time and access to training materials and lab resources, and support participation in conferences and professional organizations that provide opportunities for learning from both educators and peers. Provide your junior team members with access to senior team members as mentors, or allow the junior team members to shadow their seniors' work and be exposed to their methods and skills. Encourage learning about content not directly related to work in order to have a broader perspective.
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Encourage use of expert technical resources: Leverage resources such as AWS re:Post
to get access to curated knowledge and vibrant community. -
Build and maintain an up-to-date knowledge repository: Use knowledge sharing platforms such as wikis and runbooks. Create your own reusable expert knowledge source with AWS re:Post Private
to streamline collaboration, improve productivity, and accelerate employee onboarding. -
Team education and cross-team engagement: Plan for the continuing education needs of your team members. Provide opportunities for team members to join other teams (temporarily or permanently) to share skills and best practices benefiting your entire organization.
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Support pursuit and maintenance of industry certifications: Support your team members in the acquisition and maintenance of industry certifications that validate what they have learned and acknowledge their accomplishments.
Level of effort for the implementation plan: High
Resources
Related best practices:
Related documents:
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