Justworks Career Growth & Development

How does your team cultivate a culture of learning, whether that’s through hackathons, lunch and learns, access to online courses or other resources?

At Justworks, our culture of learning is rooted in our mission: Helping small businesses grow with confidence. Engineers here partner closely with product, design, data and our customers to solve complex, real-world problems that matter to small businesses and the people behind them.

Our culture of learning is deeply integrated into how we work, rather than relying solely on formal instruction and programming. One of the cornerstones of our culture is “52 Fridays,” the idea that every week, we make something true. A year only has 52 Fridays, so imagine the momentum of making 52 meaningful things happen for our platform and customers. This mindset has fueled a culture of learning by doing and purposeful urgency.

This also manifests through weekly team demos and our global technology demos, where engineers across all teams show the work — what they’re in the middle of building, learning or experimenting with right now. Beyond simply showcasing what we’ve made true, they’re intentional opportunities to learn from each other and stay connected to the broader progress happening across the technology organization. Combined with hackathons, development budgets, apprenticeships and mentorship opportunities, we’ve built a culture where learning happens in everyday interactions grounded in collaboration and deep care for the customers we serve.

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

Our embedded learning culture leads to better technical decisions, faster feedback loops, engaged engineers and deeper customer empathy. Because demos happen weekly, teams feel empowered to move quickly and share early. This visibility often sparks cross-team conversations, highlights reusable solutions and drives healthy momentum.

As a part of our development lifecycle, we host almost daily tech proposal sessions, where engineers present ideas or architectural decisions to a cross-functional panel of peers and leaders. These forums are frequent and open to anyone, making them powerful vehicles for learning, both for presenters receiving fast feedback and for others listening in and building technical context. Our internship and apprenticeship programs have brought in exceptional talent, including many now thriving full-time engineers, while creating meaningful mentoring opportunities internally.

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

You don’t need to start with a fully developed learning program(s). It can be tempting to spin up a shiny new learning initiative. Instead, begin by making learning a natural part of your team’s operating rhythm in service of your company’s mission.

Create lightweight rituals, like weekly demos or open forums solely focused on craft, that normalize sharing, feedback and exploration. Systematize your knowledge management in ways that reduce the barriers to learning; make documentation easy to find, keep it regularly updated and design it to support discovery. Leverage Slack channels to elevate and celebrate learnings. Build in time for technical storytelling, and encourage leaders to not just support but actively participate in the culture of learning by experimenting, sharing their own work and showing up in these forums as learners and contributors themselves. 

When you do build structured programs, treat them as ways to scale what’s already working, not as the only place where learning happens. We’ve found that our most meaningful learning moments happen in the flow of real work: Solving hard problems with empathy, improving our product through iteration and learning from one another as we build for the small businesses that depend on us.