At Raktech, we pride ourselves on ‘having a mindset of continuous improvement’. We are self-confident enough to know that we are great in what we are doing, but also humble enough to know that what is great today might not even be good tomorrow.
This mindset applies to everything we do, including our individual development. We do not measure personal growth in how high one can climb on a vertical “career ladder”, but on how big we develop our professional footprint – it is all about growing out, not up!
As a remote-first company in a very fast–changing world, we broke with traditional Learning & Development approaches and found our own way of ensuring everyone continuously develops.
To ensure we develop skills and competencies that have the highest impact on our performance we use quarterly Learning & Development Sprints!
We didn’t need to invent the wheel new as we were able to tap into practices that were already here from running sprints in software development and project management.
How it works
Everyone can, at any time, add suggestions to our Learning Backlog. Most of the time, the Learning Backlog will be bigger than what we can learn in just one quarter, and therefore we must prioritise.
Before every quarter starts, we will hold a Prioritisation Meeting to select what we will be focusing on during the next Sprint. Priorities are set by ranking all items in the Learning Backlog by their impact on our business performance.
Items with the highest impact are included in the Sprint, while the rest remain in the Backlog and will be considered again during the next Prioritisation Meeting.
Usually, we focus on two to three topics, depending on how much resources and time for learning and development we have available during each respective Sprint.
Clear Learning Goals are defined for each prioritised learning topic.
During the actual Sprint, various Learning & Development activities are offered to focus on these topics.
Such activities include,
- ‘Brainfood’ Sessions with external keynote speakers
- Virtual Classroom Training with internal and external trainers
- Coaching and mentoring
- Self-study videos and other content
The Sprint will end with a Retrospective where we assess whether we achieved our Learning Goals, what went well and what needs improvement. The learnings from each Sprint will then be applied during the next Sprint, which keeps the process itself getting better and better each quarter, so even the process itself goes through continuous improvement.
This process will repeat itself quarter after quarter and helps us to be a true Learning Organisation where everyone keeps developing.
Written by: Martin Schillig
