How IT leaders Really Learn: Personal Strategies and Hacks from CIOs

• Personal EdTech for CIOs: a "patchwork quilt" of formats
• How to learn when your calendar is full
• How they decide on training and evaluate the result
• What an "ideal program" looks like through the eyes of CIOs
• What you can do right now

Today an IT leaders needs to learn faster than the market — while the calendar is packed with meetings, and "typical" programs increasingly do not match the CIO's reality.

At one of the live discussions of the IT Leaders Club "Personal EdTech: how IT directors build their strategy for continuous learning", leaders from large companies spoke honestly about how they actually organize their learning: what works, what they abandon halfway through, and how they manage not to fall behind the business agenda.

Speakers shared personal stories: how they choose what to learn, where they find time, why they didn’t finish certain programs, and what role live interaction and professional communities play in all this.

Moderator:

• Natalya Zueva, CIO, SPLAT Group

Broadcast experts:

• Aleksey Belchenkov, Senior IT Business Partner, Arnest Unius
• Alexandra Nemirovskaya, ex. Head of Corporate Digital Development Programs, Sibur
• Dmitry Makarov, Director of Digital Transformation, TD Elektrotekhmontazh
  
  

Personal EdTech for CIOs: a "patchwork quilt" of formats

Natalya Zueva divided her learning into three baskets: "necessary but not very desirable" — technical stuff and everything indispensable for management; "want and need" — soft skills, communications, stress resistance; and "not necessary but appealing" — things that are simply interesting. For the first basket she long ago found a working format:

"I call it 'nuclear physics in comics' — a bit about complex things. There are many professional portals where you can get the needed concentrated technical knowledge in 5 minutes, enough to manage. A few years ago I would have been ashamed to call this a serious skill. Now I understand — it’s a modern form of quick information intake."

Motivation to dig into a topic often comes from a specific work situation. Dmitry Makarov distinguishes between curiosity and interest: curiosity is superficial and rarely brings real benefit; interest appears when you come with a concrete question — and leave with an answer you can apply in practice. His case: everyone around him discussed SEO optimization, and at some point he realized that in an expert conversation he could be "buried":

"That's the motivation: to sit down and figure it out, because expert communication should be built at a fairly high level. On one hand, the person who asks for development budgets — that's one side. On the other — you need to understand what the conversation is about."

Each participant has their own set of formats, and it is rarely limited to one. Alexandra Nemirovskaya clearly distinguished two types: hard skills grow well through any format — the main thing is to have practice immediately after theory. But soft skills, in her experience, require individual work with a mentor — someone who has already gone through the same task and can analyze your particular situation:

"This is the shortest path to the right answer: customized for me, individual work with clarification of the situation and inputs. And over a cup of coffee for an hour to an hour and a half after work you can learn much more than in endless courses that cover everything and often nothing."

Aleksey Belchenkov values online for flexibility — on condition that the course is broken into short blocks with opportunities for self-checks and questions in a community. Rare offline events — "rare but memorable": a four-day business simulation on digital transformation was memorable because of full immersion and live interaction with colleagues.

Dmitry Makarov described a well-working scheme: first you watch a piece of a recording, then discuss it with the team using a real case. Such a "sparring" keeps attention and immediately translates theory into practice.

An additional layer of personal EdTech for all speakers is professional communities. Live meetings and experience exchange with colleagues from other companies have become the same working channel for development as courses: here you can quickly test your solution against the experience of other leaders — and often get an answer faster than any course would provide.

That is exactly why the Global CIO community created the Summer Academy — a program that combines learning with real networking, peer exchange, and discussions with fellow IT leaders.
Click to learn more.

How to learn when your calendar is full

The main conclusion from this part of the talk: trying to "fit" learning into leftover time of the day does not work. You need to consciously restructure the calendar — and coordinate with the team.

"Effective learning is the one that is scheduled, for which I allocate specific time in the calendar when I am not disturbed. I admit, it’s not easy — it requires personal organization and for the team to work autonomously for a while. At first people didn’t understand: how can you just disconnect when there are a ton of tasks? But over time something like maturity arrives," says Aleksey Belchenkov.

His company has a corporate recommendation: once a week — fixed time for learning, with 'do not disturb' status in the messenger. At first it didn’t work, now the team uses it themselves.

Natalya Zueva found another answer to the question of time: evening meetings of 2–3 hours after 6:00 p.m. in the format of a live conversation with a speaker. Paradoxically, they work more effectively than pulling out eight hours during the day, when every five minutes someone from the warehouse writes and the information simply isn’t absorbed.

Dmitry Makarov relies on the 70–20–10 methodology: 70% of development occurs through real work, 20% through coaching and interaction with people, and only 10% through formal education. The conclusion: learn a little, but integrate it immediately into the work — and if possible pass it on to the team.

How they decide on training and evaluate the result

The decision for a CIO to join paid programs is rarely made alone. In the discussion it became clear that everyone does it differently: sometimes it is agreed with HR and the CFO, sometimes it’s a conversation with the CEO or owner, sometimes there is no separate training budget at all.

Natalya Zueva, for example, does not approve training as a standalone item: any new skills are new projects, so training is built into the project budget. The argument to management is economic: hire a ready-made specialist from the market or invest half as much and grow your own. HR often insists on study agreements — especially when expensive programs are comparable to an employee’s annual payroll.

But the main question is not how to approve it, but who to send. Natalya sends targeted training only to those who meet two conditions: personal interest and a real need for the company. Otherwise the knowledge simply does not stick. She tells the team how the career track will change if they master a specific skill — and those who really need it go.

Dmitry Makarov invented a simple filter for conferences: an employee must write five specific questions to selected speakers in advance and then report back to the team. The unexpected effect — some people immediately refuse: they are not ready to ask questions, to stand up and raise a hand.

"But those who did write the questions — already at that stage become more expert. Even if you ask only one or one and a half of them aloud, while you are just writing them on paper — you are already thinking like an expert."

Aleksey Belchenkov evaluates training results through 360 feedback — once or twice a year, collecting feedback from subordinates, colleagues, management and business customers. And through real work results: timing and quality of tasks that were in the plan. The key principle he transmits to the team: a development plan is not about additional work, but about doing current tasks differently.

Alexandra Nemirovskaya described another working filter: offer the person a corporate discount but pay themselves. You immediately find out how much they really "need" it.

What an "ideal program" looks like through the eyes of CIOs

When the conversation turned to what really works at the CIO level, the answers were surprisingly close. No one named specific platforms or courses — they talked about the environment and the format.

Practitioners, not theoreticians, as teachers. The ability to discuss your own cases, not listen to abstract schemes. Live discussions where you can ask a question and get an answer — not via a feedback form, but in the moment. And learning that does not pull you out of work, but is integrated into it.

This is roughly how the Global CIO Summer Academy is organized. Classes are online, twice a week, with no homework. This format was chosen by a professional community based on five years of experience developing educational programs for IT top managers. Another feature of the program: a strong emphasis on practice and the opportunity to review your own cases. All mentors are active IT leaders with many years of experience in different industries and countries.

Natalya Zueva formulated a principle that unexpectedly sounds like an antithesis to the idea of continuous learning:

"It seems you should learn less often. In the sense — infrequently, but better. Give yourself time to absorb the knowledge received, so that it is applied, to digest it, at least to some extent pass it to the team — and only then move to the next level. Don’t be omnivorous. Be deliberate about what information and what level of saturation you load into your already overloaded head."

A separate request, which many do not voice aloud, was raised: to develop not alone, but together with the team. When the director and their deputies learn in parallel and discuss the material applied to their tasks — a new level of internal conversation forms faster than when everyone goes their own way. In the Global CIO Academy this is common: each cohort includes CIOs, deputies, and heads of key areas.

What you can do right now

The discussion about personal EdTech for IT directors clearly showed: random learning is of little use. It is important to honestly answer a few questions: why are you learning this year, which formats really work for you as a CIO, where do you get live practice from colleagues — and how do you then check that the knowledge did not remain in browser bookmarks.

IT directors are a special audience: leaders under extreme load, in a field where knowledge becomes obsolete very quickly. According to Dmitry Makarov’s estimate, about 7–10% of professional IT knowledge becomes obsolete annually. This means a thoughtful learning strategy is not a bonus but a working tool. And building it, judging by the discussion, is better not done alone.

Enrollment in the Global CIO Summer Academy is open. Request the program and see how well the format fits your tasks and schedule.