Software team members will often talk about learning on the job, for instance, when we're being asked to implement a new technology or new version of an existing technology. This is probably the main part of how we learn. There is also social learning aspect, where we learn from groups, sometimes within our organization, sometimes by joining external meet-ups. 

Finding time to learn can be difficult, especially when we have our minds set on solving one particular problem. Putting that problem down so we can pick up something else is mentally taxing; context switching is shown to have a 20-30% impact on our time. This, in turn, has an impact on our already drained cognitive resources. So it's not surprising that, when team members are asked to put aside time for personal development, we often choose to take the easier path and continue working on the problem at hand. 

We need to make space for own personal development, and finding enough time requires team members to have a few tricks up their sleeves to make space away from their regular teamwork.

Some examples of how we could do this:

• Allocate a fixed time for personal development. For example, an hour at the beginning of the day before teamwork begins. This can be either social or individual learning.
• Have core team hours. The team could have a core of 5 hours a day where they work together specifically on team tasks. The remainder they could use for professional development, administration of tasks, lunch, and breaks. 
• Learning as a team. Just like the teams at Hunter Industries, the company that started Mob Programming, block out the first hour of the day and dedicate it to group learning. This can be reasonably free-form in nature and can range from learning a specific tool or technology to reviewing how a particular problem was solved by the team yesterday and what they could do to improve their solution.
• Allocate a fixed time where the group puts down tools. For example, some companies I've worked for set aside every Friday afternoon, which is equivalent to 4 hours every week or 10% of our time. A similar alternative is to take the whole Friday every other week.

The common theme with all of the preceding approaches is to ensure that we have the space to take the time we need.