Upskilling Your Eng Team: The Problem with the Modern Approach to Learning | Skiller Whale's Hywel Carver

**Hywel Carver** (0:00)
Often, highly skilled people are really experts in what they're doing with very good intentions.
But the standard model for learning that they essentially get pushed into is not one that gets great outcomes. And I think if you're an engineering leader looking around at this landscape, why would you think that there is great learning available that is gonna change the shape of what your team can actually do? The typical model we go for is not invest in people's skills, but invest in new people who already have those skills. We look for the person who's already spent 10 years securing web apps, and we bring them into the company rather than take our existing people and give them the kind of skills that they need.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:37)
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host, Conor Bronsdon, and today we're joined by Hywel Carver, an experienced CTO and now founder and CEO at Skiller Whale. Hywel, welcome to the show.

**Hywel Carver** (1:25)
Hi, Conor. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:29)
And you're joining us from London today, is that right?

**Hywel Carver** (1:31)
I am. I'm in North London where it is gray and dull.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:36)
Well, I'm over in the Seattle area, so same deal here. So it's a pleasure to have you to talk to and kind of dive into some interesting info. To brighten both of our days, you've identified a problem that I think everyone in the audience can relate to, that knowledge isn't as sticky as what we'd like it to be.
I'm sure we've all felt this, and there's different statistics on the subject, but it's often noted that a person only remembers about 10% of a book within two weeks of reading it. And that can make it kind of difficult to learn and retain new skills, especially when the subject is coding.
So that's why we're going to chat today, right, about what it takes to actually learn a new skill, put it into practice, and how. If you're an engineering leader, you can build more skills in your existing team without having to hire more people. So let's jump right in. Hywel, why is it so difficult to learn something new, and what's going on in the brain when that happens?

**Hywel Carver** (2:25)
So the reason it's difficult to learn something new is because the things have to be right in order to learn. We are generally not very good at optimizing the sort of scenario around us for the best learning. So in your entry, you talked about both reading a book and development of skills, which I would say are actually quite separate things. Like reading a book is a good way of getting knowledge and information, which is necessary to get a skill, but it's not sufficient. If you want the skill, you have to- Told me the baseline.
Right, exactly. It doesn't get you able to do, it gets you able to maybe understand the best. To do the thing, to actually have the skill and to be able to put it into practice, you need to be doing it. You need to have a go, you need to fail and get feedback on that skill.
And if you think about, I mean, if you think about any kind of critical application where we care about skills a lot, that's pretty much exactly what happens. If you're training to be an airline pilot, they don't just have you read the manual and then sort of stick you in a plane. There's thousands of hours in flight simulators, which are constantly giving you feedback and letting you see the results of your actions and putting you in different scenarios and giving you the opportunity to kind of respond to those and improve your skills before they let you actually fly the plane.
I think that is generally emblematic of how we should approach all skill learning. We need the knowledge, but we also need to put it into practice and do the thing before we can expect to have the skill. And so this is why, to come back to your question, why it's difficult to learn something new. It's because often we conflate those things together and we think, well, I've read the book, I should be able to do the thing. And there's actually this gap in between, which is that trial and error and feedback process.