individual learning is supported and encouraged”.2


Making space for learning Our leadership at NICE took this mes- sage from our community of practice and ran with it. Our management team worked to free up capacity to allow one day a week of protected time for a group of us to upskill around automation using the R programming language. As such, in March 2022, the six of us came together as an IS ‘coding group’. For the next 12 months we used our allotted day a week to develop our coding skills and create tools to speed up our processes. From our position of being fresh-faced novices in this area, it initially felt like quite a steep learning curve, but a climb we could take on as a group, which made it feel a lot less daunting.


We also had an ambition to develop an understanding about what coding makes possible and how we can make use of it, so we can exploit further opportunities for improving our pro- ductivity. This might also identify ways in which we can collaborate with other teams in NICE, or indeed outside of the organisation, and not be completely left behind by the technicalities when talking with expert colleagues working directly with data.


Learning together


Initially we met virtually for an all-day session on Mondays, but spending all day on Teams could be a bit heavy duty, particularly before that first morning coffee, so we then split it to Monday afternoon and Thursday morning sessions.


Our main learning method was to September 2023


select simple projects (relatively speak- ing – as we were to discover) and work on them together using online guides to help us work out the lines of coding we needed to achieve the automation required. This was very much a step-by-step process but as we went along we were able to learn el- ements of the coding language that might then come in handy later on. For the most part we would work on the same project at the same time, taking it in turns to lead the coding on a screen share, whilst developing our skills, and we generally found this to be a produc- tive method as it made us greater than the sum of our parts. In those moments, where one or two of us might have felt a little confused by things, someone else in the group would find a way through in order to move us along, and this kept up the momentum.


Certainly we would not have made as


much progress if we were working on our own, hitting brick walls and losing confidence as a result. The group was also a safe space where no one felt daft for ask- ing a question or needing clarification.


Additional study


On top of this collegiate approach, we also took advantage of other opportunities for learning as well. Before we met formally as a team, some of us attended “Intro- duction to R” courses provided by the NHS R community3


, as well as the Library


Carpentry online course. These were useful for demystifying the way coding works. However in terms of making sense of it all it was much better to be working on something practical that we hoped the team would eventually find useful, rather than random test projects.


There were also bitesize YouTube courses, such as the videos by the R Ladies of Sydney4


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 21


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