Professional Development (PD)

Intention:

We want to empower everyone in our team to take PD. To do this we’ve removed a set number of days per year, as well as any specific individual's budget - we don’t want you to feel limitations when it comes to your learning and growth. We want to (and need to) invest in you.

What’s the catch?

There’s no catch, we hired you because you’re talented and we want you to maintain, as well as grow your talents. What we’re trying to do is put your professional development in your hands. Our ideal outcome is you taking the initiative to request PD; and/or asking for guidance in designing your PD plan.

Some things to know:

• PD days are fully funded by us, they don’t come out of your annual leave.

• Any conference, course, exams fees etc will be funded by us.

• PD can be blocks of time example; a 2 day course, or 1 day prepping for a gig, or could be regularly scheduled such as 1 every month or could be a few hours to join a webinar etc.

• For Australian conferences we’ll fund travel, accommodation, and the conference costs.

• International conference costs can be built into your overall salary package, or agreed as a one-off basis; there may be options to split travel or accommodation, each can be discussed on merit.

• University degrees, advanced diplomas, master's etc. aren’t monetarily funded; however, we can work with you to schedule time.

• PD doesn’t have to be solely for career progression or technical based; our PD includes holistic personal growth such a mindfulness, learning about different communication styles, understanding more about personal well-being etc.

• Check out our Travel and expenses policy to see what's covered in more details in terms of travel, meals etc

Don’t be awkward, we’re not:

How we see it, if you don’t make time for PD it can limit our capabilities and growth. Likely causing us to turn down opportunities. Your investment into PD helps us, and your team be better.

We’ve enabled unlimited PD by allowing for it in the budget (monetarily, as well as in billable time). We have a ‘placeholder budget’ based off previous years PD. As team use more PD year on year, we expect to increase the placeholder PD budgets. Your PD won’t be putting us out, we have budgeted and planned for it.

For consultants, while no different to any of our team with PD, we get the pressure of being billable and you may sometimes feel reluctant to request PD. This is where planning comes into play. Trust we will work with you around our scheduling and customers to ensure it is seamless for everyone.

Areas included in our PD:

• Personal well being

• Soft skills

• Industry alignment/understanding – e.g. learning more about the FinTech sector

• The future of work

• Becoming a thought leader/community leader/speaker

• Career progression

• Consulting skills

• Technical skills

• Exams and certification

Some inspiration for PD:

• Courses/webinars/1-on-1 coaching that improve your mental well being or help you focus, reduce anxiety etc

• Learning from others - as a group/1on1/book time with any of the team who you feel you have a bunch of questions for or some expertise that you want to learn from

• Shadowing someone you admire in the team

• Pair programming

• Specifically requesting code reviews

• Working on your own project or product; it’s aligned to us because it’s solving technical problems, learning new tech and creating something challenging; *your IP is still yours, even when it’s developed on SixPivot PD time

• Asking if you can shadow or have insight into a particular project because its tech stack is interesting, or the person doing the work you highly respect, and want to see how they are approaching it

• Hackathons

PD Plans

Our PD plans are holistic and include three pillars of development and goals:

👨‍💻Technical

🙌Interpersonal

🌱Life

For example, you may have life goals to buy a home, or interpersonal skills you'd like to develop to influence stakeholders.

Our PD Plan is to help you think through and set up a high-level goals. Please complete with as much detail as you can. But it's also ok if you do not have any specific goals in a particular area. This is your plan - your career, your life 😊

• Find link to PD Plan Template here

• PD Plans are kept by individuals (some content is confidential e.g., life goals, some interpersonal skill goals etc.)

• You and your manager will discuss your plan in your 1-on-1s

How to request PD

1. Pop in a request to Xero

2. Discuss with your manager for approval, we'll work out timing together

3. Chat with your account manager to make scheduling seamless for everyone i.e., your client

4. It gets booked in and the dates will be entered into our tracking sheet

Nice to knows

• The more notice the better for planning

• Unlimited PD doesn't mean unplanned, from a commercial point of view we need to plan for the impact to cashflow

• Want to go to a conference in the following 12 months? Include it in your PD plan please

• PD can be booked for study time as well as exam time 📕

• PD can be on the job, prior to a commencing an engagement, specifically booked days, or regular short sharp drops like 2 hours a fortnight etc

• PD is a discussion point in your 1-on-1s - use it to revisit what you have in your plan and see if you need to book time out

• Not sure what type of PD you can do? Let's discuss and investigate in your 1on1

• You can also get PD ideas via feedback or observations given by the team too

Tracking PD at the Pivots is somewhat difficult. We find many team members do PD in their own time (self-driven learning, curiosity-based projects etc.) and that's ok! But we do love to track it where possible (to see how we're going, where we need to improve, budget for better etc.). So please when it comes to identified/desired PD know you are supported in time and budget and please chat with your manager to arrange it.