Can you describe the importance of continuous learning and professional development in the field of engineering?

Yes I am a big advocate of continuous learning and professional development. When I joined by current team I saw a lot of great work done within my team and org but people usually worked in silos. There were handful of senior engineers and PEs who had a plethora of knowledge but that was not getting properly channelled down mid/junior employees. I decided to start a brown bag series every other week in the org where we will have someone sign up to share what they are working on the team. We kept the talks to be informal so that there was not a lot of obligation for people to create formal slides. They were free to have a talk, reuse a document/slide they created, or just open a code block and discuss. Worked with senior engineers/PEs in the org to drive first few sessions start sharing their knowledge accross the team. Eventually started encouraging the mid/junior level engineers to also present their work and slowly people started to come up with topics of their own. Also started inviting partner teams to talk about adjecent things and also PMs providing business impact of the work the team is doing and roadmap. The team really looks forward to this series now.

Continuous learning is essential to keep oneself up to date with industry standards. It will help individuals delve into the problems in a more robust way. For example, to connect the data and provide a 360 degree perspective to a subject, it would be great to have an in-depth understanding of different database technologies to decide which one can solve the problem more efficiently. Another eg. would be when to use REST vs GRPC Vs GraphQL. It's not mandatory to keep changing the tech but if one is invested in learning and knowing about things for how they work and what they can solve new opportunities and discoveries could be made.

It helps to keep updated with latest technology development whereby enabling faster/ efficient/ better feature / experience delivered to customer. It might even open new opportunity for the company if senior leadership is able to think ahead.

In addition to external learning, it makes sense to keep internal knowledge sharing to avoid multiple work on same feature or leverage existing stacks for faster delivery or learn from others failure.

There are roles for which there is no direct course / education formally done but people need to learn primarily in leadership roles.

I did this with in our project when client requested to improve the overall site performance. As a solution, I led the team to acquire new technologies which accomplish this task.