Scott Hanselman posts a number of great tips for improving development teams. The technical brown bag idea is one we’ve been following at work since the spring. We call them “learning lunches”, and they’ve proven to be an excellent vehicle for knowledge transfer, as well as connecting different offices of the company.
At my current employer and the previous one, I’ve tried to promote conferences, off-site training, and .NET user groups. Getting the staff to attend them has been more of a challenge here than at my last job. They’re all excellent ways of keeping technical skills sharp as well as networking opportunities.
Now that we have a new CIO at work, it will be interesting to see to what degree he’d buy in to some of these ideas.