My skills for this project:
Design thinking, presenting results, Ux research, analysis, workshop design, workshop facilitation, journey mapping, stakeholder interviews, co-creation with stakeholders, surveys
Tools:
Miro, Google suite
The situation
The management team wanted to up-skill developers and help them become full stack and at the same time empower tech leads to support their less experienced developers in this goal while also leading effectively.
The Randstad IT department offers a wide array of online training for its internal staff, yet IT employees under-utilize these resources so our team was asked to understand the reasons behind this and determine the role of learning in the IT department.
Core team: UX researcher, Agile lead with focus on change management, HR partner, Service designer
My role: As part of the core team i provided support to research in the first part of the project and then designed and lead the workshops with the pilot groups and supported managment in the pilots kick off.
The action plan
Task
Identifying the why behind the observation that IT employees do not take advantage of the trainings available to them.
Empowering employees to participate in trainings by designing customised learning and development experiences for them and cultivating a learning culture within the department.
Key objectives:
- Define the necessary elements for employee development.
- Explore ways to support employees in their learning journey.
- Identify employee preferences.
- Gap analysis: Conduct an audit to assess the current situation vs management expectations and pinpoint the gaps.
Actions
I partnered with research and the agile lead who was coordinating with our stakeholder in HR to kick start a research project that would inform our experimental pilot activities.
In order to understand the problem our process unfolded in several key phases. Initially, a survey revealed crucial insights, then subsequent desk research sought to leverage existing internal knowledge and finally interactive deep dive sessions with employees helped validate initial findings and gain further knowledge.
I used the research insights to design and facilitate co-creation workshops with 2 pilot groups mid level and Junior developers wanting to improve their hard skills and Tech leads that needed to improve their soft skills.
The outcomes of these sessions where 2 master learning journeys that where used as a starting point for the management team and HR to start solution finding and ideatin on pilot actions.
Once the pilots actions where thought out i designed and facilitated kick off learning buddy activities with the developers.
Outcome / impact
Based on the 0 to 1 survey conducted before the start and 6 months after the pilot the results where:
- Junior and mid level developers rate that their knowledge in chosen subject matters improved by 60% while their skills improved by 45% at the same time their perception of their communication skills improved by 42%
- 86% of tech leads felt that the customized learning program helped their personal development
- Regarding the perception of the importance of learning within the organisation all participants rated it 7 or higher in 1-10 scale with 54,5% rating it with 9
- 90,9% of tech leads would be interested to take part in such workshops once per year to facilitate their learning journey.
Some of the participant testimonials:
“ I liked the positive energy and the safe environment to express yourself truthfully. I like the buddy pilot. It's a comforting feeling to know that there are colleague's that are helpful and give good constructive feedback” _ junior developer
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“ Beforehand my personal goals were unclear, but due to the several subjects my goal became clear and I was adequately facilitated” _ tech lead
If you find this case interesting and want to know more about the process, key learnings and results, feel free to contact me