At Annex we are always striving to grow and improve, and we try to build this into our workday. This includes continual learning.
Here are some of the different ways we support learning at Annex.
Our team have a range of qualifications:
We are supported to attend a range of conferences and local meetups, including:
There are many avenues for informal knowledge sharing at Annex.
We use Slack for a lot of our communication. There are Slack channels for different areas of interest, including development, design, Drupal, and accessibility. People can ask questions or share cool new things they’ve discovered.
Developers support each other through code reviews. Reviewing each other’s code is a great way to learn from each other. The design team runs design practice workshops in which they incorporate what they learned during a project into their standard practices. Each of the different disciplines has regular catch ups where people share things they have learned. This includes new tools and new features in our existing tools, better ways of working, and helping each other with problems.
Agile ways of working means our cross functional teams work closely together. This allows many natural opportunities to share knowledge across domains over the course of a project.
There’s flexibility to move around at Annex. We’ve had people move from:
Through tailored support and mentorship, we empower our employees to explore roles that align with their interests and skills. This approach not only supports personal growth for Annex staff, but also ensures we deliver the best possible solutions for our clients.
Every Friday we get together for what we call “Friday sharing”. One of us, or sometimes a few of us, get together to present on a topic. Topics can be about projects, lessons learned and technical topics, but they can also be about non-work related interests that people are keen to share.
It’s a great way to get together as a team and finish off the week. We learn about interesting topics from different disciplines, which helps us be more well rounded professionals. We also practise giving effective and interesting presentations with the option to receive constructive feedback.
Recently we’ve been making our way through the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. We’re dedicating one session to each of the 7 habits, learning about it and discussing how it might apply to our work and lives.
Other topics we’ve had include:
