“Dynatracers learning from Dynatracers”: developing yourself at Dynatrace

We strive to give our employees every opportunity to learn and develop themselves to achieve their personal and professional goals.

Dynatrace strongly believes in giving employees the space and the opportunity to grow. Especially in the tech world, it’s important to stay up to date with the latest technologies and share newly learned knowledge with peers. Furthermore, learning gives people a sense of purpose and increases their happiness, and we want to create a great employee experience for all Dynatracers.

With this blog post, we want to show how Dynatrace creates development opportunities. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all, so we let our teams be creative in their learning and what they want to learn.

First, we’ll share some of what’s on offer at Dynatrace to pursue personal and professional training, and then we’ll look at how different labs encourage learning in their teams.

Opportunities and platforms

Udemy account

Every Dynatracer gets unlimited access to 180K+ videos on the training platform Udemy, which offers courses on every imaginable topic: software development, business, design, meditation, and more.

Advance Galaxy platform

Our internal platform, Advance Galaxy, features external training offerings selected to suit Dynatracers’ needs and is also open for Dynatracers to create their courses.

“Dynatracers learning from Dynatracers”

Dynatrace allows employees to share their expertise in diverse formats like online content, events, etc. We even offer a professional recording studio located in our headquarters in Linz. Events are usually regular meetups from communities of practice, like UX, development, data science, etc. Courses on offer can vary from soft skills training to more specialized topics, like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Jenkins.

External courses and certifications

Sometimes knowledge needs to come from external sources, especially regarding being up to date with trends and latest technologies. For example, we offer certified training on all hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Kubernetes) and support employees who want to attend conferences or other external courses.

How we do talent development

We’ve given you a taste of what training we offer at Dynatrace, but every team or lab learns differently based on what suits them best. Let’s have a look.

Knowledge sharing

In the Klagenfurt Lab, teams are built with knowledge sharing in mind to help reduce dependencies, bottlenecks, and pressure on team members and resources. René explained how it works: Teams identify specific topics (like Kubernetes, Support, or UI testing) and then select a certain number of people who need to reach a certain level of knowledge in this field. This way, if one person is missing (sick leave, vacation, parental leave, etc.), others can take over.

Furthermore, when a team member has attended a conference, they give an internal short presentation for the rest of the team so that the knowledge doesn’t stay siloed to one person.

Scheduled learning time

Sometimes the hardest part is not deciding what to learn but finding the time to do it. While working on your daily tasks and with the eye set on delivering the sprint goal, you may think you don’t have time to invest in learning.

To ensure this doesn’t happen, some teams in the Graz Lab have created a separate category in Jira for learning. Now resources can be planned for learning in every sprint!

In the Gdansk Lab, on the other hand, each team member gets one day every two weeks to learn. And this day and what was learned are tracked during performance reviews to ensure that people take full advantage of it.

Work and study

Dynatrace has a tight relationship with many universities all over Austria, and we actively support employees who want to pursue degrees.

Some Dynatracers work part-time to allow time to attend classes and do coursework. And thanks to flexible work time, you can always create a schedule that fits your needs perfectly.

Furthermore, we also offer all year-round positions for paid internships for high school students and university students.

The Spotlight program

For those employees who are curious about how another team works or want to switch to another project to learn something new temporarily, Dynatrace has also started offering the Spotlight program.

In this program, Dynatracers can spend either 1–2 days (Spotlight) or 1–5 months (Spotlight extended) in another team to experience first-hand how things are done in other parts of the company. It’s great for people considering their next career move and wanting to learn new things, bringing additional value to the company.

Develop yourself at Dynatrace

We’ve seen some ways that Dynatrace allows people to develop themselves and ensures that these opportunities are taken. No one size fits all when it comes to learning, and at Dynatrace, we strive to ensure that every Dynatracer can find the best way to develop their talent.

“Dynatracers learning from Dynatracers”: developing yourself at Dynatrace was originally published in Dynatrace Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.