How do you survey your employees to know what skills to teach them?

Raphael Dumas — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 15:37:09 +0000

We are a small (8 person) analytics team in a large government agency who frequently onboards student interns. Our datasets reside in an AWS PostgreSQL database and we have encouraged new employees to try doing analyses in PostgreSQL first before using scripting languages like Python or R. Invariably they run into some issues with PostgreSQL and would like one or more lessons on better practices using PostgreSQL. How should I survey them to prioritize what concepts to teach?

I've previously used Google Forms to conduct a post-mortem and the thing I found lacking was a multi-short-text input. Example being able to answer "What is your favourite animal?" with:

Cat
Cheetah

I'm picturing something that would allow multiple short answers and also allow voting on them, kind of like Facebook open-ended polls.

What else should I ask? Am I overthinking this?

Cover image cropped from Hey Christine on Flickr and is remixed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

DEV Community: Raphael Dumas

How do you survey your employees to know what skills to teach them?