Changing Software Development: Learning to Become Agile

4.3. Learning Benefits Your Business

Of course, some might wonder why a business should foot the bill for continual learning. After all, businesses hire people for the skills that they have. They may have hired you because you already know Java, so why do you need time to learn more Java? There's a straightforward answer to this question, and it returns us to the quote with which we opened Chapter 1.

Although we can buy the fastest machines on the market, only hire people with an IQ above 160, expand our teams endlessly and work to ISO-9001, we aren't actually doing anything that our competitors can't do. All we're doing is proving that we can spend money. Worse still, none of this guarantees that we'll actually develop good software.

If, instead of viewing software development as a problem task, we view it as a learning activity, we gain some new insights. Firstly, we can recognize that most developers actually want to make customers happy and – what's more – they like learning new things. It is just conceivable that a firm that encourages its staff to learn will find it easier to retain staff, hire new staff and at the same time see the capability of existing staff improve.

Secondly, every time employees learn something, they have increased the resources available to the firm. The staff members have become more valuable to the firm because they know something new, whether this be about technology, the business problem or the way in which we're doing things. Potentially, they ...