Learning and Development with Hannes Lowette

Gien Verschatse and Hannes Lowette discuss the best ways to maximise your learning and development budget

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Hannes Lowette, responsible for learning and development at Axxes, joined Gien to discuss how to build a genuine learning culture within a software consultancy and what gets in the way of it.

Key takeaways:

  • Diversify your formats. Evening sessions only reach a subset of your team. Mix in lunch sessions, daytime workshops, and after-hours events to reach more people with different life situations.

  • Respect different ambitions. Not everyone wants to learn on their own time, and that's fine. Your job as an employer is to facilitate both the nine-to-fivers and the fast-trackers, just be honest about the trade-offs.

  • Graduates struggle with domain understanding, not code. Fresh starters typically find the technical skills manageable; it's understanding the business domain and working with legacy codebases where they fall short.

  • AI tools help, but lack context. Coding assistants accelerate learning on the fly, but they reinforce past patterns and can't tell developers why a pattern fits, or when it doesn't.

Shownotes

Event Sourcing: Dealing with an Eventful Past - https://2026.dddeurope.com/program/event-sourcing-dealing-with-an-eventful-past/

Hannes Lowette LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanneslowette/