How a Learning Culture Fuels Tech Success and Happy Teams
Let’s be honest—tech doesn’t slow down for anyone. As an engineering manager at Wix, I’ve seen firsthand how fast the landscape shifts: new tools, frameworks, and customer expectations pop up almost overnight. In this whirlwind, one thing stands out as a game-changer for both a company’s growth and its people: a learning culture. A tech organization that prioritizes continuous growth doesn’t just survive—it thrives, delivering innovation while keeping its employees engaged and fulfilled.
In this post, I’ll break down why learning matters in tech, how it drives healthy company growth, why it’s a secret weapon for recruiting developers, and how it boosts employee satisfaction. Plus, I’ll share a few practical ways to make it happen. Let’s dive in.
Why Learning Matters
Tech evolves at warp speed. Skills that were cutting-edge five years ago can feel dated today—think of how AI has flipped the script on development. A learning culture keeps your team ahead of the curve, ready to tackle whatever’s next. At Wix, we’re all about empowering users to create standout websites; staying sharp ensures we can keep delivering on that promise.
But it’s more than just keeping up. When employees are encouraged to learn, they bring fresh ideas to the table, a team that learns can pivot fast because they’ve got the problem-solving skills to back it up in addition to the best practices and global knowledge of the entire organization to do things right.
How It Drives Company Growth
A learning organization isn’t just adaptable—it’s a growth engine. Teams that upskill regularly can deliver solutions faster and better than competitors. It’s a competitive edge that’s hard to beat.
It also attracts talent. Top engineers don’t just want a paycheck—they want a place where they can stretch and grow. A learning culture cuts turnover and pulls in the kind of talent who’ll push your company forward. Plus, when employees cross-train—say, a frontend dev learning some backend tricks—they can tackle broader tasks, reducing bottlenecks and boosting efficiency.
For a company like Wix, a learning team translates that into real impact. The more our people know, the bigger the impact and the quality that they will bring.
Learning is a strategic investment in people. You invest time now in learning in order to move fast in the future, thus ending up saving time in the long term.
Enabling the Recruitment of Junior Engineers
Here’s where a learning culture really shines: it opens the door to hiring junior engineers. These are bright, eager folks who might not have a decade of experience but bring fresh perspectives and a drive to grow. In a learning-focused org, they’re not a gamble—they’re an investment.
Juniors fit perfectly when growth is built into the system. With mentorship, hands-on projects, or even a quick course, they can go from tweaking code to solving complex problems in no time. A junior might start by mastering the use of our state of the art frameworks, learn how to design scalable and resilient systems and grow into a senior throughout her career at Wix.
This approach is cost-effective, too. Hiring seniors can be challenging as the competition over talent is fierce and talent is scarce, but juniors—nurtured in a supportive environment—can deliver huge value while sticking around for a long time because they feel invested in. It’s low risk, high reward and a perfect fit for a company that values innovation from the ground up. Senior engineers bring a lot of knowledge and can be productive pretty fast, but on the other hand, have also sometimes past practices from previous companies they have worked with, that do not always align with the best practices we have at Wix, this is where a learning opportunity also happens for them, unlike juniors that are a blank page that are eager to learn the best practices from scratch.
A learning culture doesn’t just benefit the company—it’s a lifeline for employees. When people feel supported to grow, whether through a workshop or a guild day’s lecture, they gain confidence and ownership over their work and increase the employee retention.
Making It Real
So, how do you build this kind of culture? here is what we do at Wix:
At Wix we have our Guild structure, where we invest 20% of our time for guild activities and learning.
Each developer that joins Wix undergoes a learning journey, which starts in the onboarding phase and continue throughout their first and sometimes even the second year in the company, where they undergo scheduled workshops, booster courses and special training, making sure everyone is knowledgeable and performs at the highest quality,
In addition to the schedules courses, there are other guild activities:
Guild activities include, for example, Guild day, once a week where we conduct lectures and workshops to teach new practices, technologies, design, AI and many other topics.
Guild weeks: where once a quarter a developer leaves their team and goes on to do other tasks, like join a different product team, work in the infrastructure group for a week, prepare a lecture for a guild day and many more activities they can choose from.
Learning facilities: At Wix we have dedicated a large space at our new campus to be dedicated to learning, we have many classrooms that we conduct training and workshops, large auditoriums for conducting lectures and host guild days. If you walk through “Wix Learn” any day of the week, you will find groups of people conducting educational activities.
This facility also allows us to launch recruitment and training programs for junior developers like Wix Kickstart for juniors, Wix Enter and Wix Grow for students or Wix Boost for more experienced developers, which reduces the organizational cost and overhead of recruiting and training. The fact that we can recruit and train cohorts of juniors, let them assimilate into the teams easily, reduces the training overhead on the teams and helps juniors to be productive much faster and with better quality training.
It is not just the facilities, we even have an organization called “Wix Academy”, which specializes in learning and supports the guilds in creating learning materials and learning activities at the highest level.
The highlight of our learning culture is demonstrated once a year on a large scale with the WixEngineering conference. On this day we take over a thousand engineers from all over the company to a full day of learning, lectures, workshops and fun learning activities. Unlike public conferences where you need to cater to a wide range of audiences and topics, this conference is a highly technical one that focuses only on relevant topics to Wix engineers day to day work and challenges. All the speakers at the conference are Wix engineers themselves, which brings yet another dimension of learning by teaching. This conference has become a yearly tradition of Wix, and it is highly anticipated by everyone.
Wrapping Up
A learning culture isn’t a “nice-to-have”—it’s a must for any tech org serious about growth and people. It keeps companies agile and competitive while making employees feel valued and excited to show up. The result? A healthier organization and a happier team.
So, what’s one step you could take to spark learning where you work? I’d love to hear your thoughts—drop them in the comments!
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