Growth and development of technical staff?

Question

Project management

It is often said grow the staff, promote growth. How to put it into practice if the staff is not so large that would allow two mentor-student.
For example, an employee will grow professionally if he masters a new technology / framework / base. But you can't trust him to master something on a real working project... There may be sad consequences)) The same with a new language. Well, he will master it, and we all write in a different language ...
How do you contribute to the professional growth of your employees and what else is a criterion for professional growth for you besides new technologies?

Answer 1

The first thing I want to say is that the development initiative must be spontaneous. Not everyone wants to really develop and make some significant efforts for this.
Specifically, my opinion: it is necessary to carefully influence the technical growth of IT specialists. Engineers are a very punctual and zealous (in professional terms) category of people. Employees are already in the company, which means they have sufficient (in your opinion) skill. Self-respecting programmers read books, lead home-projects where they hone their skills (I hope you have just such ones :)).
You need to start from the simple: what is negative in work => suppresses energy => you don’t want to create => you don’t develop. Misunderstanding between operations and technical teams? Because the former are constantly bombarded with mind-blowing tasks, while the latter, fixing bugs, add new ones. Are you in the "enterprise" and limited in your actions, because no one wants to introduce a new framework "on the whistle" (reliability for the sake of fashion)? The manager again filled up with some incomprehensible tasks, etc., having done which, do you understand that they could have been grouped differently? We can continue... Some of these problems can be solved by normal, healthy communication (sometimes it is worth making sacrifices among employees - I had that too).
I am not a manager. I'll tell you about 3 years of experience (from the senior years of the university), which was the start of my career. Definitely learned a lot back then. Initial data, to make it clearer: an organization (foreign, if it is important) with a representative office in the Russian Federation, IT Implementation Department.
This phrase will need to be placed in place of the three dots in each paragraph ("..."):
What I thought was important for growth from the side of the employee :
0. Intelligent team leads / architects who are ready to share knowledge - these need to be sought out and directed to less experienced ones. At one time, I absorbed knowledge from older comrades at a frantic pace. The team is strong as far as the weakest (and other blah blah) is strong. In any case, their level spurred me on. It's an important factor, no matter what. There must be leaders (by the way, not only technical ones).
...
1. Transparent business system. This means that information about what is happening in the company on the battlefield (business) is available and understandable to every employee, regardless of his position. If a programmer / tester wants to know how things are with new clients, in which tenders we participate - please. But without fanaticism and early discovery of information. What are the moods of current customers?
What internal organizational moments occur ?
2. Each employee can easily organize one-to-one with the manager. Talk about the tasks being performed, summarize, discuss some plans for the future (for business, for your involvement in future projects, for possible growth, for the current tasks of colleagues). It becomes easier for an employee to understand the applied component of his work and put forward his ideas and proposals (reasonably). The manager is familiar with the mood of each team member => distributes tasks more optimally, and in general it becomes easier for him to "pull" the threads of management.
...
3. As individual as possible in "conveyor" training. For example, English classes: here the guys and I looked like corporate lessons - but it was more like a course for show (most of the "students" are no matter how, no matter how hard the teacher tries ...). And time passed, and for the Nth time I already heard the manager "on a call" with foreigners. Then the idea was born to unite in a group with a topic who really WANTS and find a teacher from the school. No sooner said than done. For more than a year we studied with a separate teacher who came to our office. Then they even knocked out a little budget for themselves with the help of a manager (not 100% covered, of course). And in the end, everyone is happy - we know English (the main thing is that they began to use it later), the company, respectively, also has some pluses.
...
4. Give employees sometimes a little more important tasks than they are used to doing. Give whists in a different way. It is difficult to give concrete examples here. For example, take a programmer on a business trip to a location at the stage of assessing the infrastructure and getting to know the client. Although he is not really needed there. Or connect him to a conference on an important issue. This will give the right people more confidence and motivation, and they themselves will be ready to generate ideas for the good, even without a stick.
...
PS I'm not there anymore, and indeed cool (from the word "drastically") changed the stack of technologies. But I appreciate the experience that I was able to get there.

Answer 2

conferences / trainings, although this is messy, such as how parents force them to study
so that the guru is difficult, and also - not everyone needs it, incl. companies

Answer 3

But you can’t trust him to master something on a real working project ...

There are test benches for this.