Practice : Shared Learning Days

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Shared Learning Days are regular, structured time carved out for engineers (and their cross-functional peers) to pause delivery and invest in skill development, exploration, and knowledge sharing. These days foster a culture of curiosity, reduce burnout, and accelerate capability growth across teams.

By aligning on shared time and shared intent, organisations ensure learning is prioritised - not squeezed into spare hours - and encourage peer-to-peer upskilling that multiplies impact over time.

Description of the Practice

  • Scheduled company- or department-wide (e.g. one day per month or quarter) to create protected learning space.
  • Teams and individuals choose how to spend the day - from formal courses to experiments, tool exploration, or community sessions.
  • Can include internal tech talks, platform deep dives, external guest speakers, pairing clinics, hackathons, or book clubs.
  • Encourages reflection and cross-pollination of ideas outside of delivery pressure.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Set a recurring cadence and communicate clearly that the day is for learning - not catch-up delivery work.
  • Provide a mix of curated and open-ended options: talks, workshops, “office hours,” and space for individual goals.
  • Make it optional, inclusive, and low-friction - no heavy reporting or justification needed.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Create themes (e.g. “Observability,” “Cloud Native,” “Tech Debt Day”) to spotlight focus areas.
  • Rotate facilitators and encourage grassroots organisation - anyone can propose a session.
  • Capture what was learned via async sharing, lightning demos, or summary posts.
  • Create a shared calendar or repo of recordings, slides, or insights for future reference.
  • Link Shared Learning Days to career development and engineering pathways.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Explore - don’t feel pressured to deliver an outcome.
  • Share - what you’re learning, what you’re building, or what surprised you.
  • Invite - others to join, observe, or mentor.
  • Reflect - what should we bring back to our team?

4. Watch Out For…

  • Leaders treating the day as optional or reclaimable for delivery work.
  • Participation dropping due to poor visibility or misaligned incentives.
  • Sessions feeling too formal, overproduced, or intimidating to host.
  • No space to follow through on ideas sparked during learning.

5. Signals of Success

  • Participation is high and diverse - across levels, disciplines, and teams.
  • Teams act on what they learn - refactors, experiments, capability growth.
  • Sessions are energising, inclusive, and easy to access.
  • Peer-led learning grows and spreads across the organisation.
  • People look forward to learning days - and feel supported in using them.