Building Your Agile Mindset, Idea #4: Actively improve your skills

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G’day, training & certification community! Last week, I let you know about our brand-new free course called Beginner’s Guide to Agile in Jira, designed by friend-to-all @Andrew DeBell. 

Inside that course is a tip sheet listing six concrete ideas to help you build your agile mindset. We want to hear from you with your real-life experiences putting these ideas in action.

This post is the fourth in a six-part series (check out posts one, two, and three!). In each, I’m sharing one of the tips, and you can comment on this post below with how you’ve put it into practice in your professional life. Our plan is collect our favorite advice in one post, then share it back with you—and put it on our website, for other folks to learn from.

Also: We’ll be awarding something special to our most engaged users throughout the series! 👀 🥳

Ready to get started with the fourth tip?

Tip #4 to Build your Agile Mindset: Actively improve your skills

Agile is all about continuous improvement. In your daily work, always look for opportunities to learn and grow your skillset.

Pause for a minute and think about your current skills: Which skills seem to be most valuable? Which skills mesh well with your natural tendencies? Use these questions as a starting point to help you plan which skills to sharpen.

Prioritizing your skill development is always a good idea. Not only does it help your team, but it also improves your future career opportunities.

Now, answer these questions by adding a comment below:

• Can you tell us about a method you use to make sure you’re actively improving your skills?

• Where do you have room to improve in terms of building skills?

• Do you have a trick to jog your memory or help you flex your habit muscle so that you’re always remembering to try to grow your skillset?

I’ll go first, to get you started with an example.

Do you have a trick to jog your memory or help you flex your habit muscle so that you’re always remembering to try to grow your skillset?

Our entire Atlassian University growth marketing team — @Seema Seehra, @Ben Thoma, @Michael Antonicelli, and our delivery lead Iryna Panchyshack — has a standing meeting every Friday late-morning called Always Be Growing. The meeting serves as a casual way for us to connect while learning something new, and even in the busiest weeks, it is so nice to have 60 minutes carved out for skills development. So my tip would be to put an hour on your calendar—with colleagues, if possible, to boost your motivation and commitment even more!

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Enroll today in the free course: Beginner’s Guide to Agile in Jira

Read the sixth post in the series: Tip #6: Have a plan, but be ready to pivot

Read the fifth post in the series: Tip #5: Ditch perfectionism

Read the third post in the series: Tip #3: Innovation

Read the second post in the series: Tip #2: Communication!

Read the first post in the series: Tip #1: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

[Sam Nadarajan]

Can you tell us about a method you use to make sure you’re actively improving your skills?

Gamification is a motivating factor for me, any opportunity for skill improvement to feel like a game gets me excited and into a competitive mindset.

Where do you have room to improve in terms of building skills?

I work on skill improvement in bursts, which is very unpredictable and leaves me to the whim of my emotions to improve and better myself. I'm recently learning that doing a small amount of work each day or week, whether I'm super motivated or not, helps me go farther with less stress. Consistency and baby steps is the key for me to keep getting better.

Do you have a trick to jog your memory or help you flex your habit muscle so that you’re always remembering to try to grow your skillset?

I will do quarterly planning and make small, 1 sentence statements for what skills I want to improve by the end of the quarter. I will also put time on my calendar to work towards that goal. Before I would never schedule time on my calendar for personal development, but in an ever increasing busy world of work I need to ensure I have time for myself to grow.

[Jaime Netzer]

Thanks so much for these @Sam Nadarajan — I'm just reading a book by Oliver Burkeman called the Antidote: Happiness for People Who Hate Positive Thinking and one of his main suggestions in the book (and his main beefs with self-help) is to not worry so much about whether or not you feel motivated, and to just do it anyway. His point is that waiting to *feel* it actually adds more stress and another step between you and the work you need done!

[Andy Gladstone]

Can you tell us about a method you use to make sure you’re actively improving your skills?

Reading. That is the number one way that I improve my critical (and non-critical) thinking, which is the greatest skill one can possess. No matter where I go in life, my brain will be an asset that travels with me. Many people will ask 'what do you read'. The answer is - everything and anything.