Monthly Learning Session #1: Customer Sensitivity Training, Book Reviews, and Test Driven Development

Last January 31, 2015 was our first Monthly Learning Session (MLS) for the year.

While we have weekly learning sessions every Wednesdays, we do save the last Saturday of every month for our monthly learning sessions.

The first MLS included Customer Sensitivity Training conducted by myself. Me and Hilton went to a similar seminar last September 2014 and we wanted to share what we learned from that seminar to the team.

early morning Saturday morning training

The takeaways from this training are plentiful, but could be condensed into the following:

• You have to be self-aware. Know yourself so that you may gauge your attitude towards your customers.
• You have to be honest to yourself. Your weaknesses might be the one causing trouble in the workplace or with your customers, and not other people, as you are wont to believe.
• You have to change these weaknesses and turn them into something positive.
• If you feel good about yourself, you will also feel good about everything else. Customer Service is just the Golden Rule in practice.
• Always be positive, open, sincere, and adopt a good attitude in all your dealings.
• Diplomacy is the best approach to all things.

The team had a lot of fun doing the exercises:

What makes you happy? "I am most happy when I'm alone."

The boat is sinking, group yourselves into two's!

getting ready to attack the challenge

different strokes for different folks

FOCUS!

A couple of book reviews were also shared that day:

Nap doing the book review for "Linchpin - Are you Indispensable? by Seth Godin"

Nap learns from Godin's book that "artists change generic work into art by incorporating emotional labor in it." The book also largely talks about linchpins - those movers and shakers who may not be famous but are the building blocks of organizations and who are very hard to replace - who we should all aspire to become.

Sonito reviews "Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims" 

Sonito learns that it is better to make methodical series of little "bets" - small goals that are easy enough to achieve - and learn from these when they are successful but more importantly, when they fail. This is more effective that planning the big picture of the project all at once.

And the rest of the afternoon was spent for the technical training done by CTO June on Test Driven Development for Python. This is kind of technical, so I can't explain in full detail only that Test Driven Development testing is important so that we can guarantee the quality of our products. There's gonna be lesser to virtually no bugs or errors, and we do this to make our clients happy!

listening intently

CTO June training the devs and testers on Test Driven Development

We spent the day learning new stuff and honing those things that we already know and we are the better for it. Learning never really stops, not when you graduate or when you stop studying; rather, it continues on and on because there are a lot of things in this world we need to know and learn for us to be better at what we do and who we want to be.

onwards and upwards, Ingeneers!