Skiller Whale

About Skiller Whale

Skiller Whale is CTO Craft’s long-standing, highly recommended, strategic partner for all upskilling and capability growth.

Created by CTOs, for CTOs, Skiller Whale’s micro-workshops condense “learning from experience” in short, powerful, interactive sessions led by expert practitioners. As shown in our review by CTO Craft founder Andy Skipper, they have created a wholly new approach to one of the most powerful levers a CTO has to impact productivity, code quality and retention.

It’s hugely more engaging than traditional training tends to be … cycle time reduced by 40% and throughput increased 235%.

Why Skiller Whale?

By working with Skiller Whale you have a trusted partner focused on the highest leverage action you can take – improving the skills of your people.

CTO Craft and Skiller Whale have worked together for several years now which is why Skiller Whale is a Trusted Partner. We believe that Skiller Whale has been a game-changer for the CTO Craft Community. Their tailored, hands-on approach delivers immediate value, helping technology and engineering teams bridge skills gaps, plus foster a culture of learning. It’s been a pleasure collaborating with such an innovative partner, and I highly recommend them to any organisation looking to supercharge their team.

Methodology

Here’s Skiller Whale’s thesis: People learn from people, from mistakes, and from feedback.

Which generally means that people learn from experience. That takes time, and relies on learning opportunities presenting themselves.

Skiller Whale developed their concept of ‘micro-workshops’ to simulate and accelerate ‘learning from experience’ in intensive, focused, hands-on sessions led live by expert practitioners.

Instead of waiting for topics to come up and be learned through code reviews, Skiller Whale performs a diagnostic to find the areas that every developer still has left to learn – this is applicable from a bootcamp grad all the way up to principal engineer. Based on the results, micro-workshops are delivered on the topics that will impact your metrics.

Skiller Whale moves beyond the traditional view of training as a perk negotiated through the HR department. Instead, it transforms learning into a strategic advantage for teams, enabling them to grow in ways that directly impact their work and their engineering metrics.

The single most valuable thing we offer our Engineers

For someone with ADHD, this training stuck where all previous ones didn’t

This is the best use of our engineers’ time. Engineering organisations spend a lot of money on salaries - so this is about trying to get as much in return for those salaries as possible. Investing in effective training is therefore very important, and I’ve seen its impact - I have gone from being unhappy with pretty much all PRs to being happy with basically every single one.

Best format of training I have ever had.

Meet Skiller Whale

Hywel Carver, Founder, CEO – Skiller Whale

Hywel wrote his first program in C aged 9. After graduating with an MEng from Cambridge, he dropped out of his PhD programme to co-found his first start-up. Today, Hywel is Skiller Whale’s Co-Founder and CEO. He runs a dinner club for CTOs, a podcast for tech leaders called ‘Primarily Context-Based’, and is designing and building his own 8-bit computer for playing Pong. In his 12+ year career, he’s been building and scaling start-ups. With Skiller Whale, he is drawing on that experience to solve the biggest problem he faced as a CTO: learning for engineering teams.

Connect with Hywel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hywelc/

Dave Millican, Co-founder & CTO – Skiller Whale

After working in race strategy for the Ferrari F1 team, Dave led the data science team at an EdTech start-up before co-founding Skiller Whale.

Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmillican/

CTO Craft Trusted Partners

Trusted Partner