Staying relevant in ever-changing industries greatly relies upon innovation and continued education. This is not only true for a business as a whole, but continuing education at the worker level is vital to business success. At gap intelligence we greatly value continuing education. Every gapper is allotted an education budget to sharpen current skills or explore learning new skills to better themselves and the company.
Investing in Our Employees
Personally, having the opportunity to take online courses on subjects like SQL and Excel’s VBA/Macro utility has allowed me to solve problems faster and have more of an impact on my teams and projects. Through this I’ve been able to experience both personal and professional growth, taking newfound skills and context and turning them into innovative ideas. Knowing that I have the encouragement of gap intelligence has shown me the meaning of employee investment – helping me learn the skills and trade necessary to help gap intelligence become the world’s most respected business and intelligence platform and services company. Let’s take a look around the office and see what some of our gappers have been learning and how it has impacted their roles!
Laurel, Data Manager
Laurel, a Data Manager, has been learning SQL (Structured Query Language) and database structure, as well as taking courses and reading books on Project Management. Although SQL may not take place directly in her day to day role, understanding database structures and their rules has made it easier for her to understand how or why things may break in our new API. It also helps her explain to other people why we may need to upload files a certain way. Understanding the capabilities and benefits of SQL has helped Laurel and our database guru, Eugene, solve a problem involving the handling of millions of rows of data on a monthly basis, something Excel is not an ideal tool for.
Continuing your education is super important. Keeping your mind stimulated helps you stay interested in your job. When you master one skill, it's time to start mastering another. You never know how an innovative mind (you or someone else) may see that skill set you have and find a way to apply it in a way you may have never thought of.
Nick, Data Manager
Nick, also a Data Manager, has taken up learning how to code to improve his weekly workflow. When we were presented with the problem of missing data, he figured that the best way to retrieve these prices from websites was to code these actions into a Ruby script. The code that Nick wrote was able to scrape the backend of a website for the data we were looking for as a supplement to our regular weekly data crawler.
Continuing to learn and improve provides people the opportunity to grow their skill set or learn a new a skill that can increase revenue, decrease costs, or give them a stronger sense of purpose at the company. Learning code has given me a better understanding of how coding works and has allowed me to obtain more data.
Eric, Senior Application Designer
On the software development side, Eric Gomez, a Senior Application Designer, has spent some time learning the ins and outs of the BEM CSS framework, an approach to front-end development that promotes code scalability and modularization. BEM has made front-end code easier to write for other non-front-end developers as well. Recently, because of BEM's strict, predictable naming convention, Shavkat Samatov (Senior Software Developer) was able to quickly understand and write standardized front-end code for a product we are currently building. As our products grow, their front-end code will benefit from the modularity and scalability of BEM.
As part of a development team you should never stop learning because web technology is constantly evolving at a rapid pace. You need to be open to continually learning new skills if you want yourself and your company to stay competitive.
Staying Relevant, Fostering Innovation
Continued education plays a key role in gap intelligence's culture, and it is of growing importance to any profession. Staying relevant and adaptable can lead to enhanced effectiveness or even developing new business. Company initiatives that support continued education not only empower workers to become more innovative and create more impact in their roles, but also fosters and encourages professional growth within the company, boosting career satisfaction and creating a more balanced environment for everyone.
