Keeping up is the ultimate challenge for employees and companies within fields of massively fast-emerging trends shaping how to work and deliver. Learning and spreading expertise is also key to success while householding the knowledge of older technologies to maintain systems efficiently. The classic learning approach needs too much time to scale understanding and to adopt new technologies, especially remotely. It needed to be extended to a more self-defining and community-driven model with the ambition of being highly interactive and hands-on.

Target Audience: Engineering Manager, Agile Coaches, Employee Engagement, Senior & Executive Leaders
Prerequisites: None
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
In our talk, we examine a case study on a three-year journey of creating, establishing and organically scaling a continuous learning community within GFK SE. The community started with two people and an idea – and is now an online event with hundreds of participants, from all over the globe!
But the talk doesn’t start with the solution! The story we would like to show you started in the darkness of two COVID-19 home offices occupying an MS Teams call. As was for many other people, the rash switch from mostly in-person, physically-centred collaboration to an environment that eradicated the physical elements of collaboration and made us all equally miserable, exposed a lot of practices that were not so visible before. So was the reality of learning in our company – people learned a lot from each other, but very localized, on a very small scale. Knowledge-sharing, workshops were done in groups of ca 5-10 people at most and were happening completely ad-hoc, all over the place, and as a result, topics would often be done multiple times even in the same physical location, with varying contents, recommendations and quality. With two words – it was all fragmented and invisible. On the other hand, as we went remote, it became really hard to do the same thing, so people, especially trainers, started complaining that it was so complex and time-consuming to do all this now via MS Teams. This is where the recognition started, that behind training content itself, there is so much more that impacts a successful or awful training experience.
Over the course of a few months, we gathered data, started a trainer community and came up with a lofty idea and a vision of what we wished to achieve.
When we started, we had three goals in mind:

1. Spread knowledge and skills efficiently to avoid reinventing the wheel
2. Contextualise learning – make not just the topic relevant, but take the examples, case studies and context for the sessions from our own “GFK kitchen”
3. Grow even more trainers and leaders – we ask trainers to come with a less experienced co-trainer who can in this way easily learn and practice how to be a trainer, gaining leadership skills

In addition to that, we also envisioned some benefits that would come from the unique synergies of the format – building trust, expanding people’s networks into other locations and work contexts through participating in a safe, learning-centred environment; breaking down functional silos more and more through continuous exposure into different areas and problem spaces; employee retention through an opportunity to recognize, grow and engage employees that were very interested in being trainers or mentors.
We were two people, and immediately everyone around us said it can’t be done. As we are in a talk about our success story, obviously we faced mountains of issues and our enthusiasm and idea almost died at one point, but we did it and are here to share with you all the nitty and gritty details, drama and recipes on how to make this happen!