Welcome to the Learning & Development (L&D) page at GitLab! L&D is an essential part of any organization's growth, success and overall business strategy. We want to support the growth of our GitLab team-members' competencies, skills and knowledge by providing them with the tools they need and also the opportunities to progress their own personal and professional development.
Slack: #learninganddevelopment
Email Us: learning@gitlab.com
Our mission is to provide resources to enable our team members to enhance success in their current roles as well as develop new skills to further their professional and personal development. We provide adaptive and blended learning and growth opportunities, including skills building, career development, and technical training that aligns with our strategic priorities as an organization. At GitLab, we are cultivating a culture of curiosity and continuous learning.
Meaningful and relevant content. We deliver learning solutions that drive the development and growth of team members throughout their life cycle at GitLab.
Values aligned. Our learning solutions reinforce GitLab’s values, and foster continuous learning and curiosity.
Diverse approaches to learning. We apply a blended learning model for learning solutions, and adapt to various learning needs.
Community. We make our L&D offerings available to the public, aligned to our mission that everyone can contribute.
We are a small team but we've got a big role to play at GitLab!
Live Learning sessions will be conducted on a monthly basis. There will be a Zoom video conference set up for each session. Official dates and topics will be added to the schedule below as confirmed. If you were unable to attend a live learning session but still want to learn, check out our past live learning sessions below. At GitLab we give agency, but if you are attending Live Learning sessions you will be asked to be engaged and participate with your full attention.
Action Learning sessions are designed to give team members a place to practice coaching skills by helping others work through specific challenges.
An overview about the format as well as topics and dates can be found on the Leadership Forum handbook page.
We provide our team members with certifications to demonstrate their knowledge on specific topics. We have outlined our current certifications as well as planned and upcoming certifications for the year.
Everyone's career development is different, but we have outlined what it can look like at GitLab. Career development also includes our GitLab coaching framework to support managers with holding coaching discussions with their team.
Whether you are a People Manager or an Individual Contributor, being skilled in "emotional intelligence" (also referred to as EQ) is a key attribute to interpersonal effectiveness. We have outlined the definition of emotional intelligence, how to understand your own EQ, how to develop your EQ in a remote setting, and building an inclusive environment with EQ.
Another strategy to improve emotional intelligence is to apply the Social Styles framework within your team to increase interpersonal interactions and team dynamics.
If you have any language courses you would like to recommend or links to websites please add them to this section.
There is also a way to practice foreign languages and ask for advice in several Slack channels, each dedicated to a specific language. You can find all these channels by searching for channels starting with #lang. If you're missing a channel for your target language, feel free to create one and mention it in #whats-happening-at-gitlab so that fellow GitLab team-members can join too!
GitLab has a growing resource to enable all team members transitioning to a manager role. It contains a link to a checklist, readings, and a form to help learning and development customize your development as a manager.
We are piloting the Manager Challenge program during the month of September to over 30 people leaders at GitLab. The Manager Challenge is to first step to building out a comprehensive manager enablement curriculum.
We are always working to create more learning content for our team members. If you have a learning request that you would like the Learning & Development team to develop in partnership with your team, please fill out a learning-and-development-request issue template in our issue tracker. Our team will review and set the priority for your request based on the scale and impact across the organization. Learning items that will be applied and used across the company will take priority.
If you have developed the learning content and would like the Learning & Development team to review, fill out a learning-and-development-review issue template in our issue tracker.
Our team will review and set the priority for your content request or review based on the scale and impact across the organization. Learning items that will be applied and used across the company will take priority.
If you are devleoping content to meet your learning needs or partnering with the L&D team, here are five key principles to consider when formulating a learning session:
Know Your Audience - Analyze and assess the course audience. Ensure that all audience needs are accounted for at every level in the organization you are delivering the training too.
Define Learning Objectives - Highlight what you want the learner to walk away from the session with. Consider developing two to three broad overall statements of what the audience will acheive.
Break Down Complex Information - Consider breaking down complex information into easy to digest visuals or text. Reference the handbook but do not be afraid to create a visual representation or use storytelling for the audience.
Engage the Learner - Adults learn through practice and involvement. Consider using tools to engage learners in a virtual setting like Mentimeter or Kahoot to stimulate interactivity. Ask the L&D team for more insight on learning engagement tools. There are a lot you can leverage!
Implement Blended Learning Course Content - Give the audience some pre-course work to read and review before the learning session. Use off-the-shelf resources and ensure the content is applicable to what will be covered in the session. Follow up with the audience following the session to gauge how they've applied what they've learned on the job through surveys and questionmaires.
Adults learn differently in the workplace than they would in traditional learning environments or how they learned growing up. If you are developing training, consider applying principles related to Adult Learning Theories, those include:
Transformative learning: The learning experience should aim to change the individual through transformative learning approaches. Start with learning experiences that appeal to your specific audience, and then move to activities that challenge assumptions and points of view.
Self-directed learning: Most of the learning that adults do is outside the context of formal training, so there should be an emphasis on augmenting those informal learning experiences. Infuse applications of pre-reads and post-course follow up. Have the participants bring up examples of self-directed learning that they have taken that is related to the training course.
Experiential learning: Adults learn through experiences and by doing. When designing a learning experience, apply activities to stimulate learning by doing through role-playing, simulations, virtual labs, case studies, etc.
Andragogy: Recognize that adults learn differently than children. Design learning experiences with the assumption that your participants will come to the table with their own set of life experiences and motivations. Adults tend to direct their own learning, tend to learn better by doing, and will want to apply their learning to concrete situations as soon as possible.
We are currently in the process of implementing a Learning Management System (LMS). We are also in the process of evaluating several content libraries to accompany the LMS to provide curated and off-the-shelf courses for our team members. The content will be supplemental to GitLab customized content. More details to come in the next few months!
To help us continue to be Handbook First, course content in the LMS should be structured in the following ways:
GitLab has a number of compliance courses and resources. Explore the drop downs below to learn more.
If you have any questions or need further help please ping people ops in the #peopleops channel in slack.
Questions related to growth and development on the semi-annual Engagement Survey have a favorable score. The exact target is to be determined.
Total number of promotions in a rolling six month period/total number of employees. The target for this is to be determined.
This is calculated the same as 12 month voluntary team member turnover KPI but is using the number of team members actively choosing to leave GitLab to growth and development related reasons only. The target is to be determined.
