The 6 Best Strategies For Learning From Your Colleagues

Whether you find yourself taking on a similar role at a new company or are starting out on a brand new career path, there is sure to be a moment on your first day that you ask yourself, “How do people do things around here?”. The first few months of a new job are often about learning how you fit into the picture of the organization; crawling before you can fly. After 6 months of working with Codelink after graduating I have found there to be 6 activities that I recommend for adjusting to and living happily in your new work environment.

Check before you Ask

There is no such thing as a stupid question, though it can be of a benefit if you try to find the solution yourself first for something that may be basic. Be sure to do a quick google search first, or check the company onboarding docs. Your colleagues are there to help you, though be considerate of their time.

Build Positive and Open Attitude

When your attitude goes up, so will the attitude of those around you. By maintaining a positive attitude you can create a positive environment for those around you, including your mentors, seniors, and colleagues. A positive attitude can help to break down any walls between you and your colleagues. Colleagues who have perfected their skills and have become specialists love to show their skills, and from this you can learn and grow, so do not hold back from expressing with them that you really want to know more about the knowledge and understanding they have built. When they are explaining to you, never try to interrupt them to show off your own knowledge, or even worse to try to prove that they’re wrong. Respect that they have taken the time to help you, and understand that if you try to take the moment to instead show your own skills, they will likely not be very interested in helping you again.

Balance Giving and Receiving

Most of the time receiving is better and easier to do than giving. However, when you receive a lot from your colleagues, don’t forget to give something back to them as a grateful gift. Being a helpful guy for your colleagues in some small cases is enough. Everyone is great at some things and struggles at others. For some of my teammates, keeping consistent with design is hard, for others they sometimes forget the project management tasks such as daily reports and meetings. Aside from coding, I have found myself to be quite good at being detail orientated, and have tried to use this skill to help my team. I have built these into my workflow by taking notes, documenting features, implementing unit tests,.. You can volunteer to handle that. I think they will be really happy if there is someone who could help them solve those boring, non-official but essential tasks. By the way, those boring tasks are also good for you, too.

Forgive tiny mistakes

Whilst your colleagues may have more experience than you, they are still human, and all of us humans make errors. You should be humble if you see their errors… such as “Do not take this as an opportunity to try to look better than your colleagues, instead you can take this as an opportunity to build up your teammates and help them improve, whilst forming bonds of trust.

Be confident to express your idea

Sometimes you need to prove yourself in discussion or meeting. When you read this line, I think there are many people misunderstanding my thinking. I don’t want to tell you about the aspect that your idea or your solution for some problems is better than your colleagues. I mean when you can prove you have knowledge about that issue they will respect and want to discuss deeplier with you, which will help you learn more advanced knowledge. Don’t let them estimate you work as a student or even a burden in a team.

Host friendly parties

Don’t forget the friendly parties outside with your colleague. This activity is not only for businessmen but also for bonding everyone. And I think you already know the reason why we should do this. In my case, my team does not have a drinking culture after working time. We rarely gather together for non-business purposes. Otherwise, we usually go out for lunch on weekdays. Those moments are great to me, because I have time to connect with others and stay far away from the 8-hour air-conditioner environment.