GitLab Career Growth & Development

How Richardson’s Team Cultivates a Culture of Learning

• “Peer Mentorship and Learning Partners: Our learning culture builds on peer mentorship, where engineers at all levels teach and learn from each other. When someone needs to learn Rust, for example, or explore Vue more deeply, we pair them with either a team expert or someone else who wants to learn with them. I identify real-world problems that allow engineers to learn and refine skills through practical application.”
• “Engineering Mentor Circles: We organize mentor circles for intermediate and senior engineers, with each mentee assigned up to three mentors for a maximum of three milestones. This targeted approach accelerates skill development within specific timeframes.”
• “Knowledge Share Sessions: We host regular knowledge share sessions on architecture, languages and design patterns. All sessions are recorded and shared for all Gitlab engineers to access.”
• “Capstone, Innovation and Passion Projects: Each engineer is assigned one capstone project and selects one passion project each quarter. Learning goals are aligned with capstone and passion projects. We create custom development plans and select books, courses and conferences to support their development.”

How does this culture positively impact the work your team produces?

Our capstone and passion projects yield measurable returns on learning investments. One engineer enhanced multi-IDE Diagnostics across VS Code and JetBrains Editor Extensions while mastering TypeScript and Kotlin. Another engineer’s exploration of Rust resulted in the DaVinci Knowledge Graph architecture, now recognized as a next-generation project at GitLab.

What advice would you give to other engineers or engineering leaders interested in creating a culture of learning on their own team?

Model learning yourself and be transparent about struggles. When I was learning Rust, I openly asked team members for help, showing that growth happens at every level. Structure peer mentorship without bureaucracy. Our mentor circles and skill-pairing systems remove friction from knowledge-sharing. Make it easy to find who knows what. Protect learning time and celebrate intelligent failures. When engineers feel safe experimenting with new TypeScript patterns or Rust optimizations, innovation follows. Finally, connect learning to impact. Help your team see how mastering Vue’s composition API or Rust’s memory safety directly benefits users and business outcomes. Learning that drives results creates lasting cultural change.