About the Author
This site was created by Jasmine Robinson, as a resource for professional technical learning colleagues. Jasmine began her career as a Technology Director in Academia where she supported dozens of education technology solutions, wrote multiple custom web applications to facilitate learning and embedded with instructional designers while supporting online learning & services with 800 faculty and 40,000 college students annually. She pivoted to Corporate Developer Education in 2019 and has been applying best practices in academic technology and adult-learning to the corporate sector. One of those best practices includes collaboration amongst industry peers to exchange best practices and this website serves as an ideal starting point.
What is Developer Education?
Professional Developer Education is typically a team responsible for the company developer/engineer onboarding and continuous learning. They may be referred to as:
- Developer Education (DevEd)
- Developer Training & Enablement
- Engineering Education
- Engineering Learning
- TechEd
- Technical Learning
- Technical Learning & Development
Developer Education’s goal is to accelerate engineer productivity by providing them with the essential information necessary to immediately provide value to the company. A member of a Developer Education team will typically perform the following:
- Foster a culture of learning that promotes inclusion and diversity in teams, interactions, and learning models
- Identify learning opportunities and training needs through cross-functional relationship building.
- Design, develop, and deliver impactful, scalable learning experiences in collaboration with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
- Measure the outcomes and impact of learning initiatives and leverage results to inform planning directions.
- Evangelize the Developer Education Program and help ensure engineers are matched with the best program offerings.
Ideally members of a Developer Education team have a strong technical background, modern application architectures, software development lifecycle, data processing, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.
Job titles found on Linkedin for Developer Education members include:
- Engineering Learning Specialist
- Engineering Learning & Development Lead
- Learning Platform Architect
- Learning Engineer
- Head of Technical Learning
- Senior Learning Consultant
- Senior Learning Technologist
- Senior Program Manager, Engineering Training
- Senior Training Program Manager
- Senior Manager, Learning & Development
- Senior Director, Technical Program Management and Learning
- Technical Program Manager, Engineering Education
- Technical Training Program Manager
- Senior Program Manager, Engineering Learning and Development
A common misconception about learning is that it is exclusively training. It is important that Developer Education teams think holistically about learning including:
- Institutional Knowledge
- Documentation
- Hands-on Labs
- Post-Mortems
- Asynchronous and Synchronous Debugging (Chat, Ticket systems, Email, etc...)
- Self-Service Support/FAQs
- Questions answered during meetings
Anytime knowledge is exchanged, that is a learning opportunity and the true challenge is in making the discovery of that learning quick and efficient.