At this time of year, lots of folks stress over choosing holiday gifts for their staff. Chocolates? Too generic. A gift certificate? Way too generic.

We’ve got a different concept. We’re giving our folks the gift of a stronger career.

In the past few months, we’ve invited some of our key staff to attend professional development sessions focused on interactive design and development.

In November, two of us attended the Future of Web Design conference in New York. This was an amazing opportunity to meet thought leaders in our field and explore developing technologies and trends – everything from code management and CSS3 to mobile UX and HTML5.

And in November, two more of us attended the WebVisions Web Usability Conference in Atlanta. Again, we got to socialize and share with the developers who are creating the cutting edge in UX. A huge focus of the conference was on responsive design, a paradigm that we’ve already brought back to Atomic and are applying to our work.

Spending time and money on this kind of training is valuable in so many ways. Not only does it teach us how to implement specific new technologies, it helps us think about problems differently. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and keep solving the same challenge in the same way. Being exposed to so many new ideas has helped everyone on our team break out of our creative patterns and come up with new solutions for our clients.

It’s also reinforced our commitment to each other – to building a team, together, that’s as strong as it can possibly be. Lots of people think that developers are closed-off computer nerds, but we know differently. Developers share a unique passion: to be awesome at what they do. And it’s a great feeling to know that we’re helping everyone at Atomic do that.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone.