Learning & development for tech leadership: Key skills to build

When you transition to leading a technical team, you need more than just leadership skills—you also need to maintain a solid technical foundation. A great tech leader not only guides their team effectively but also leverages technical expertise to make informed decisions. 

Unfortunately, many tech leaders neglect their own upskilling once they step into leadership roles. In this article, we’ll underscore why upskilling is important for tech leaders and what tech skills to focus on in your limited learning time.

Our business landscape is evolving rapidly, driven partly by the rise of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. As a result, tech is getting more and more interwoven into our daily work.

Consider the evolution of non-technical roles: Not long ago, a head nurse at a hospital wouldn’t have needed proficiency in tools like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Today, these skills are essential for managing data, creating presentations, and producing reports.

If professionals like nurses must upskill their technical knowledge, tech leaders are certainly no exception. Continuing to grow your skills will help you:

• React quickly to new market trends 
• Better navigate disruptions such as digital transformation and market volatility
• Provide valuable insights into which tools, services, and technologies to use for a new project or feature
• Boost team productivity and retention
• Identify cost-saving opportunities, such as optimizing cloud expenditures or streamlining operations
• Mitigate risks that could lead to costly breaches or regulatory penalties

According to the forgetting curve by Hermann Ebbinghaus, we will forget 90% of new information within the first seven days. One of the best ways to overcome the forgetting curve is by actively learning new information. Therefore, it’s important to find ways to apply your learnings to increase skill retention and make the process more enjoyable.

To implement active learning successfully, set clear objectives. For example, you might focus on improving your team’s security posture with a new tool. Once you’ve acquired the right security skills, you can build a small-scale demo to showcase the potential of the technology and its value for the company. If this renders a positive outcome, you can move forward with broader implementation.

Coaching or mentorship opportunities can also help you implement and reinforce your learnings. The right coach or mentor can provide invaluable guidance, and becoming a mentor yourself can help you put your skills into practice.

With your limited learning time, determining which technical skills to develop is crucial. Focus on gaining broad knowledge that covers various technologies, market trends, and tools. Avoid deep, vertical expertise in a single area. Here are some key skills to consider:

Should a technical leader be able to code? A basic understanding of coding principles can build trust among your team. But it’s more important for tech leaders to develop their fundamental technology knowledge across critical tech domains. 

Beyond fundamental knowledge, it’s beneficial to get a good grasp of developer productivity and developer experience tools. Developer well-being is essential to foster a strong team culture and motivated developer team.

AI is reshaping the way we work and even entire industries, making it a must-follow area for tech leaders. However, there’s a flipside to this rising AI trend. Tech leaders should also learn the limitations, pitfalls, and risks of AI tools. 

AI can harm your organization if you don’t use it correctly. For instance, maybe someone shares sensitive information with AI tools or doesn’t validate AI-generated code. To mitigate these risks, set clear boundaries for AI usage. Guide your teams in safely integrating AI into their workflows, ensuring that AI augments human decision-making without replacing critical oversight.

Alongside AI, watch for other emerging technologies like blockchain, IoT, and edge computing. The tech landscape offers many opportunities to improve your product and become more competitive in your industry.

Get an executive briefing on AI and find out if your organization is ready for AI technology.

The ability to collect, process, and interpret data is vital to making well-informed decisions. Building data literacy skills enables you to make better decisions and align team performance with company goals using frameworks like KPIs to track progress.

Ultimately, a single cybersecurity issue can harm an organization's reputation. Tech leaders must know cybersecurity best practices for data handling and be aware of legal standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act.

You’re not expected to become a DevOps practitioner, but understanding key DevOps concepts like continuous integration, deployment, and monitoring is vital. All things considered, DevOps plays a crucial role in maintaining the quality of your code and product, so stay on top of DevOps industry trends.

You should develop a good understanding of cloud practices, as cloud integration is now an essential element in every project. It’s easy to get lost in the different cloud service models like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Not to mention the different cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Each type of cloud offering has its own pros and cons. By building your cloud knowledge, you can make informed decisions that yield tactical advantages—such as enhanced scalability, cost efficiency, and faster product time-to-market.

The right tools can enhance your team’s productivity by streamlining project tracking, issue management, and overall communication. Get familiar with project management and collaboration tools such as Monday.com, Trello, and JIRA. 

For example, JIRA can integrate with your code repositories to automatically track issues and releases, while Monday.com offers automation features that streamline tracking and updating tasks.

Successful tech leadership involves balancing strategic thinking and technical competence. A technical leader who lacks technical skills may struggle to gain credibility among technical team members. Conversely, a tech leader with a strong tech background but little team management skills might deal with low team morale despite having the right tech knowledge.

For this reason, it’s important to keep building hard and soft skills. When you’re a well-rounded leader, you foster a positive team culture, drive innovation, and ensure that you and your team are prepared to meet future challenges.

Ready to help your teams upskill? Get tips from leading organizations.