Never stop learning
"We must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"
I’ve talked before about how continuous learning is important on support teams, but we’ve always taken it for granted that it’s a good thing. This week let’s talk about why. TL;DR: because it helps prevent burnout, and because providing technical support in any company is always a moving target. And don’t think that as a leader you’re exempt from learning new things too!
Burnout
This is the angle I focused on before, since burnout is a large issue in any technical support team. If you spend all day every day working tickets, you’re going to get bored, overwhelmed, or both. Burnout isn’t far behind. While there are all sorts of different activities you can assign to your team to help break up the day and ensure they’re not grinding out tickets all day, there are some distinct benefits to technical training: first, it’s close enough to standard support work that it isn’t very disruptive to go from ticket handling to learning new technical skills or brushing up on some existing ones. Second, and relatedly, training is interruptible: if something urgent comes in on the issue-handling side, you can pause your video (or stop reading) and turn to addressing the customer issue. When it’s resolved, you can pick up where you left off in your training.
Third, and even more relevant, is that the skills that your engineers are learning in their set-aside training time are directly applicable to their daily work and will make them more effective support engineers for your specific customer base. It’s this point that we’ll focus on next.
Relevant technology is a moving target
It’s important to remember that this customer base is not static: you’re regularly gaining (and, let’s be honest, losing) customers, and even among the ones who’ve been with you a while, their own technical teams are not standing still. They’re learning new skills, trying out new technologies, integrating new products and methodologies into their own environment, and you need to grow along with them. When customers start asking about technology that’s new to you, don’t ignore the warning—educate yourself so you can help them.
As an example, when I first started at one job back in 2018, we only rarely heard about customers using containers, and to support our customer base I only needed to know a little about Docker. Two years later, the containerization field had exploded and almost every one of our new customers wanted to use Kubernetes (K8s). Fortunately, my team’s skillset had grown as well in the interim, and we had several folks on the team who could speak the language of containerization and orchestration to those customers. This wasn’t a coincidence! As soon as customers started asking us about K8s, we made a deliberate effort to learn the tech and make sure we had at least one SME (subject matter expert) before we fell behind.
This pattern repeated over and over on every support team I’ve been a part of: the tech world doesn’t stand still, so neither can your team. It’s not just a nice perk to give your team space to keep their skills up to date—it’s a matter of great importance if you want to continue providing a high level of support to your customers.
Logistics
Setting aside training time: The best way to make sure that your team members are actually taking time for learning is to block off their calendar. How much time to set aside is going to depend quite a bit on the size of your team, the overall support load, and so on, but at a bare minimum there should be 1-2 one-hour blocks per week set aside for on-the-job learning. Keep an eye on your team’s calendars and check in with them in your 1:1s to make sure they’re actually using that time for training.
Choosing training topics: It’s important to make sure that your employees are actually using this time to learn skills that are useful in their day-to-day work. I’m a big fan of broadening horizons, but it’s hard to justify blocked-off training time if it’s being used for learning things that won’t be relevant to the job. If your product is completely on-premise, for instance, it would be hard to defend an employee who’s using the time to get AWS certifications. You should generally be able to trust your team’s judgment on what is and is not relevant, but it’s best to have established guidelines you can point to in case of questions. Following on the previous section, the guidelines can be simple: anything is fair game if you, or anyone else, has had to work with it in the last 6 months. Special attention is due those topics and technologies that nobody on the team is currently very experienced with.
Certifications
A lot of the training courses your team will be taking will be in service of earning a certification—the various cloud providers have a pile of certifications specific to their own cloud, the Linux Foundation has its own set of vendor-neutral certifications, and then there’s the never-ending list of industry groups, first-party vendor certifications, and other certification providers. The cost of getting these various certifications can vary widely, but by and large I think they’re worthwhile for one simple reason: they give a defined target for your team members to aim for, and a specific end goal to achieve. Obviously there’s nothing stopping one of your customer engineers from getting any certification she wants to, but I think it’s worth building a reimbursement program to further incentivize your team members to become certified. Again, it only makes sense to reimburse certifications that make sense in the context of the support your team is providing, but promising to pay for the cost of getting a relevant certification is a great way to make sure that folks on your team are actually using their learning time appropriately.
Continuous learning as a leader
I’d like to wrap this up with a couple of observations about continuous learning when you’re a support leader. While learning new skills and sharpening old ones is going to look different for you than for the members of your team, it’s no less important to your own well-being and career.
You’re probably going to fall behind on the technical skills. This was something that, frankly, I had a hard time coming to terms with myself in my first managerial role. Everyone on my team was keeping up to date with the skills and technologies that our customers were using, and I was falling further and further behind. Eventually I had to make my peace with it—a support team manager needs to be able to pitch in on technical issues in a pinch, sure, but their main job is to lead the team, help everyone on it be successful, and make sure the work gets done. Keeping up on bleeding-edge technology is secondary to all that.
Where you need to focus your own learning is on the skills that are specific to your role. Once I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with my team on the technical front, I realized that it was still important for me to take time for learning as well. Burnout is just as real on the management side, after all, and improving managerial and coaching skills is always worth the effort.
Though it may feel impossible to find time to set aside for continuous learning, especially if your team is overloaded, understaffed, or both, the benefits are obvious: reduced burnout, improved technical skillsets, and finally a better customer experience. If you’re not already encouraging (or mandating) a few hours a week in skills training, get started this week! You’ll reap the benefits sooner than you expect.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!