Six months ago, I wrote about a voluntary career development call I started for my IT team. Ten months in, we’d never missed a session and never had zero attendance. I promised an update. Here it is.
We’re now 16 months in. The call is still going. But it looks very different than it did when I wrote that first post , and the changes taught me more about leadership than the original experiment did.
In This Post
- What Changed , Cadence, format, and finding the sustainable pace
- When the C-Suite Showed Up. What happened when executives joined
- The Updated Numbers , 16 months of metrics
- Tangible Outcomes. What we can actually point to
- What I’ve Learned Since , Deeper lessons from the second half
What Changed
After just over a year of running every single week, we hit a wall. Not the team , us. The three hosts were starting to feel the burnout of committing every Wednesday night without exception. The attendance was still steady, but the energy was dipping. We needed to be honest about sustainability.
We changed the cadence to every other week. The energy improved immediately. Attendance didn’t drop , if anything, the sessions felt more focused because people had time between them to absorb and apply what we’d discussed. Less turned out to be more.
We also heard from team members who wished the class happened during work hours. We were adamant that this had to stay extracurricular , all volunteer, after hours , but we made a small pivot. Once every couple of months, we’d take a timely topic like automation or AI and do a five-to-ten minute teaser during one of our weekly all-hands meetings. It served two purposes: share a little knowledge during the workday, and increase awareness of the after-hours program. But we kept the two completely independent.
The sessions themselves evolved too. We started at two-hour blocks and have tightened them to about ninety minutes. The format settled into roughly 25% structured and 75% free-form , and that ratio has proven to be the sweet spot. We also began targeting a director-level or C-level guest speaker roughly once a month. That decision changed everything.
When the C-Suite Showed Up
Here’s something I didn’t expect: I never mentioned this program to my boss. We ran it every week for about three months before the CIO even knew it existed. When he found out, we asked if he’d be willing to join as a guest speaker. He said absolutely.
That session had roughly 50 attendees , our highest ever. About 60% were first-time participants, some of whom we never saw again. But the guest speaker got the word out in a way that months of organic growth couldn’t match.
When the CIO spoke, he sounded a lot like us. He focused on ownership: you need to manage your own career, you need to develop your own skills, your employer needs to work with you and you with them. It was a very honest, open-hearted conversation , no corporate talking points, just a senior leader being real about what it takes to grow. That session was memorable for the entire team.
The Chief Human Resources Officer was equally impactful in a different way. He gave an exceptional session on managing your boss , the art of leading up. For a room full of individual contributors and mid-level managers, hearing the CHRO speak candidly about managing up and managing down was powerful. When he came, he brought along a few members of his own HR team. We’d opened the door to cross-departmental participation, and it worked.
Beyond the C-suite, we’ve hosted Senior Directors of Infrastructure, a Senior Director of Cybersecurity, and experienced systems administrators as guest speakers. External guests are on our list for the next phase.
The fact that the C-suite saw value in a grassroots, voluntary program tells you something about what this became. It wasn’t just a call anymore , it was a signal that the organization valued professional development at every level.
The Updated Numbers
Here’s where we stand at 16 months:
- Duration: 16 months and counting
- Frequency: Weekly for the first year, every other week since (adjusted to sustain energy)
- Cancellations: Still zero
- Sessions with zero attendance: Still zero
- Regular participants: 10–15 per session
- Peak attendance: ~50 (CIO guest speaker session)
- Guest speakers: CIO, CHRO, Senior Directors, senior technical staff
- Certifications earned: 2 (CompTIA A+)
- Departments represented: IT, HR, and growing
Tangible Outcomes
Two team members earned their CompTIA A+ certifications directly because of the structured sessions we ran early on. We don’t have direct promotions we can attribute solely to the program yet, but the indirect effects have been significant.
The feedback has been consistent: people regularly tell us how much they value the sessions. It’s affected morale in ways that are visible even if we don’t have a formal metric for it.
The cross-team relationships may be the biggest tangible outcome. Before this program, our systems engineers, field technicians, network team, data center staff, and cybersecurity group operated in their own lanes. Now they know each other. They’ve sat in sessions together, shared perspectives, asked each other questions. The collaboration that comes from simply knowing the person on the other end of the ticket has been a measurable improvement in how the team operates.
When the Chief HR Officer found out about the program, he didn’t just volunteer to speak , he had follow-up conversations about how we built it and how it works. That kind of executive attention to a grassroots initiative tells you it’s making a visible impact.
What I’ve Learned Since
The first post covered the early lessons , that people show up when you create the right space, that soft skills hunger is real, that curriculum kills conversation. Six months later, three more lessons stand out:
You learn what you can’t learn in one-on-ones. I don’t have the opportunity to sit down with every person in a hundred-person IT department. This call gives me a much more granular understanding of what my team knows and what they don’t know , and more importantly, what they want and what they don’t want. That’s been a huge advantage as a leader. It makes me better at my actual job.
Sustainability matters more than intensity. Running weekly for a year felt heroic. Running every other week feels sustainable. The program that exists in six months is infinitely more valuable than the one that burned out in twelve. We should have made this change sooner.
Voluntary beats mandatory , every time. This isn’t the first time I’ve taught IT professionals. At previous companies, I ran weekly hard-skills and soft-skills training that was mandatory and during work hours. Those sessions were beneficial. But this is the first time I’ve done it as an all-volunteer, after-hours program , and the difference is profound. When people are there because they chose to be, the engagement is on another level entirely. They get more out of it. And honestly, so do I.
The Bottom Line
I’ve spent 30+ years building infrastructure , networks, data centers, monitoring platforms, AI-driven automation. But this voluntary Wednesday evening call might be the most important thing I’ve built in my current role.
Technology changes. Platforms get replaced. Architectures evolve. But investing in people , creating a space where IT professionals can talk honestly about their careers, their challenges, and their futures , that compounds in ways that no technology deployment can match.
16 months. Never missed. Never empty. That’s not a program. That’s a culture.
What keeps me logging in every other Wednesday after hours?
They want to learn. I want to help them get there.
Craig Corbin is an IT executive with 30+ years of progressive leadership spanning military operations, enterprise hospitality, and maritime fleet technology. He writes about building teams and systems at craigcorbin.com.