In PHP Posted May 10th, 2021
With rising technical demands for every website including better user experience and security, it is now more important for your team to be more skillful and be able to work under higher stress.
However, improving your PHP development team skills cannot happen overnight and a consistent effort must be taken by everyone so that your team takes their skills to the level that meets the demands today. In this article, we will look into some of the ideas that can help you.
Chances are very less that you don’t use any open source projects. Think of Laravel or WordPress and many things for that matter you use many open source tools in day to day professional life.
Contributing to the cool open source projects your team likes is a great way of giving back to the community and also, your team picks up a lot of valuable skills during this time.
Most of the time, your teams do not write throwaway code. The code they write must be read by others and also their future selves in bug solving, improving features and many more issues, which makes having good coding standards indispensable.
A good side effect of using established coding standards is that they can help in ensuring reliability and also security!
There are many guides and also tools that help your team’s professionals in improving their code and meeting the standards. By perfecting the coding standards, your team’s skills are sure to go up!
Sure, there is the digital revolution and developers can read much online, but reading a fine book still has its benefits! Unlike many of the articles or series of posts that can be found online, most of the books provide comprehensive knowledge and insights regarding PHP development.
Also, encourage the members of your team to share the materials and also what they are learning with each other and help others build up their skills. Not only does this result in overall improvement in the skills of your team, but you also build an environment where everyone takes care of others and invests in the growth of them.
Conferences are a great place for sharing knowledge and also in part a networking event. Periodically visiting conferences would imbue your team with a lot of knowledge. Not only physically though, many conferences are happening virtually and so your team can participate in them from anywhere!
Help your team members go through various professional certification training and examinations. As many standard certifications involve learning and applying many fundamental techniques, they would provide a huge benefit for your team.
However, just don’t give them targets to learn. After they complete certification, may be give them a company award or appreciate them specially at team meetings.
Rewards naturally encourage people to achieve something. As such giving your team members learning incentives which increase with the complexity, much of them would be willing to learn new skills.
Of Course, there are a lot of ways of providing learning incentive, you may give one time reward, a job promotion and many others. You can also give certain awards like most active learner, most competent in the challenges and more.
As you might know, coding is only a part in overall software development. Down from requirement elicitation to deployment there are a lot of things going on. Pure coding skills do not do much alone.
So, make sure you have an organizationally defined and optimal process with all the necessary controls. Working in this environment would certainly give your team the skills necessary for developing reliable software fastly.
Getting external help is not inherently a bad thing. There are many organizations who provide valuable training for employees to improve their skills. If you have enough resources for receiving such training, don’t hesitate to take one!
Final Words
Improving your team’s PHP needs sustainable efforts from all members of the team. They have to be given appropriate resources, proper guidance if needed and create an overall environment for growth.
If you have the resources, it would certainly be a good idea to take help of external organizations for building the skills of your PHP development team. However, in the pursuit of technical excellence, do not make them crunch beyond their limits, because employee happiness and satisfaction must also be a top priority!
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