| If we're talking coaching then having a weekly learning session would be good.
It would be even better to share it with more people and have a mini lesson.
I wouldn't call it 1:1, even if I did similar things because the company we worked for mandated 1:1s religiously and we were out of things to talk about. If a 1:1 is just a way to surface problems with the employee and plan skills progression, weekly is way too much.
Even monthly, there is hardly something new going on, in my experience. I think this happens because of deep issues with how companies operate, which is a frustrating and painful issue to deal with upper management. The problem with skill progressions in most companies I've seen is that they're something meant to retain engineers, while what engineers are hired for is to build a product. Once you're not a junior engineer anymore, you have probably seen all the technical tasks you can do. What are you going to learn next? Functional programming? Cool, it will come in handy to fix pixels on buttons. Some companies are better than others. From what I've seen, it's worse where skills progressions are basically irrelevant for promotions and raises and the only factors that matter are product related. It's hard for an engineer to get the time out of their busy schedules. I've seen two types of engineers. Those who don't care about their career and spend as much company time learning something to show off at their next interview and those who care so much about the product that they don't have time.
I'm sure just the notion of these factors being in play influence the way mentees portray themselves to mentors. If you don't trust your mentor and you know there is no punishment or reward for not learning whatever skill is important to learn, you'll just say you didn't have time to learn it and focus on the product. |
I promote explicitly scheduled focus time (ex: 4 hours twice a week of "GSD"). Also a good manager will know when they really don't need to probe on current health & status and happily call a meeting early. I wish more meetings ended with "we're done 30 minutes early!"