Continuous Learning Initiatives - Learning Vehicles
Learning Vehicles Initiative
This week I’d like to describe one of the on-going high-level initiatives launched last year as part of a multi-threaded approach to rise to the challenge of achieving continuous learning within our growing Digital Delivery Group (DDG). I’ll explain what the initiative is about and how it inter-relates to the others as part of an over-arching strategy. The collective goal of the initiatives is to “build people” and, as “Fun” is one of the seven Capgemini core values, we want to have fun along the way.
Forgive the academic terminology used for this initiative. In my view this is an impressive area for Capgemini. Attending the Pluralsight UK User Group earlier this year and reading around what other companies have been doing made me realise what great strides our Learning and Development Team at Capgemini has already made to make learning as accessible as possible to everyone.
The Learning Vehicles initiative really lays the foundations for the other initiatives to build on downstream. Management direction and support for learning play a big, on-going part in this initiative.
Traditional Tools And Approaches To Learning
The Capgemini “My Learning Portal” allows users to sign up to a vast array of classroom-based courses covering both technical and non-technical subjects as well as a range of on-line eLearning courses, videos and books (known as “Books 24-7”). Capgemini also cover well-being and life circumstance type subjects as well as environmental and ethical matters.
Self-sourced training courses from external organisations and attendance at conferences are also options and we have that thing called The Internet too.
New Facilities And New Ways Of Learning
The traditional tools and approaches to learning have been supplemented with additional facilities and ways of learning since our office received a massive makeover – so much so that we had to vacate the building for several months and when we arrived back the re-partitioned building had a new name (“@Phoenix”), re-numbered floors, lots of vibrant colour and also new furniture designed for improved collaboration and productivity – all of which we now mostly take for granted.
The new facilities also included new rooms designated and equipped specifically for learning and knowledge sharing.
Top Skills
The New Ways Of Learning Team also set about obtaining some Technical Leadership to identify and group the top skills and emerging industry roles applicable to our business and making them known to people with regular comms and links to useful material. This is really helpful in our Digital world when there are so many choices to whittle down from.
Individual teams are responsible for contributing to and analysing the Top Skills to prioritise relevant skills and plan them into their strategy and training. (This is where the Team Health Check initiative and management direction and support for learning fit in.)
Learning Has Its Place
We’ve got lots of places for learning – some more exotic than others.
Campus Serge Kampf Les Fontaines
Named after the founder of Capgemini, to the north of Paris we have the Capgemini Campus, Les Fontaines which looks like a fairy-tale French Chateau and which is also home to the Capgemini University. (Watch a short Les Fontaines video.)
Capgemini University courses aren’t just limited to the Campus, the talented instructors travel all over the world delivering courses and for a few years I worked periodically alongside some of them teaching Agile courses in the UK. (Those were great days and I sure learned a lot from those very clever people.)
At Your Desk Or Around The Office
If fairy-tale castles aren’t the norm for you then there is always the option to learn from your desk (or from home) or even from different locations within the office where we have designated Learning Hub rooms or cosy pieces of office furniture (some with iPads attached) that let you hide away to study on-line with partner tools such as Pluralsight.
In The TechHub
The TechHub is a busy and well-equipped venue for learning. The strap line for it is
“Technology Worth Sharing” and it’s where we host the Learning Cinema and many of the events
for our Technical Communities, vendor interactions or technical learning series (such as
learn Python or React). You also often find people playing with trendy gadgets in there such
as robots, 3D printer, AR/VR, Alexa and Raspberry Pi devices for example. New tech arrives
there all the time.
It has the biggest TV touch-screen I’ve ever seen and it’s also where we run Tech Talks which are recorded and streamed live to multiple locations via Skype. The TechHub can occasionally be a tough gig for junior speakers in front of a camera and/or a big technical (and sometimes unforgiving) crowd. No pressure when the tech isn’t working! 😊
The TechHub has its own merchandise such as T-shirts and stickers. I heard that there are plans to take the TechHub and learning “on the road” with a number of technology initiatives planned.
The Learning Cinema
We host The Learning Cinema every Thursday morning from 11-12, usually as two half-hour
sessions or occasionally for an hour. We also use it to support company themes such as
Mental Health Awareness week.
The format is simple: gather to watch a short video together (thanks YouTube) and then discuss. You can even interrupt the video if needed to ask questions – not something you should try at your local cinema.
We delivered 100 sessions last year covering a vast range of topics and including non-technical stuff such as TED talks and things like happiness at work, memory skills and sleep engineering as examples. (Maybe I’ll post some of these on Twitter in future – see @DilemmaLearning.)
Some sessions attract more attendees than others and we advertise using a great tool called the “Event Hub” built by our fab Comms Team which allows anyone to browse or arrange and publicise events with visibility across our whole account and with a useful weekly email distribution to let people know what’s on, when and where. Links to all the content shown are held on a wiki for anyone who missed sessions or wants to re-visit material.
Study Squads
Certifications are a concrete way of demonstrating our technical credentials to our customers and so people occasionally group together to study and share knowledge in preparation for certification exams.
It’s a great way to up your commitment to learning and be encouraged by one another. Certified people often come along to sessions to share tips and answer questions.
Learning doesn’t have to be lonely!
Customer Learning Facilities
At Capgemini we extend our learning facilities to our customers too. For example, there is the Applied Innovation Exchange (AIE) offering an opportunity to get hands-on with technologies to discover possibilities (watch AIE video) or alternatively there is the Accelerated Solution Environment (ASE) where we facilitate powerful interactions to tackle complex business challenges (watch ASE video). We also use our local ASE as a venue for our annual account-wide Kick-Off and Kick-On events.
Kit
I’m an old-school Windows user and my laptop is as heavy as it is powerful which means I don’t need to go to our gym on the first floor as I have my very own home-weight-lifting kit. I’m able to install pretty much whatever software I need to and there’s no lock-down on Internet access. Some of my more trendy colleagues use those silver things with the nibbled fruit logo but I have enough learning curves already so there’s no possibility of me switching.
I’ve also seen people using large tablets to write and draw on with a stylus in meetings but I still use an A4 notebook and pen although I do take the odd photo of whiteboards or table-tops with my phone. It’s whatever suits you to get the job done.
The Daily Stand-Up Meeting
Every day we have a departmental stand-up in a corner of our large office run by a different
team each day. I never imagined a daily stand-up would work with so many people but it’s surprisingly
effective for communicating. A gong signals the meeting is about to start.
The meeting starts with a team giving their update followed by standard format notifications and people chipping in as appropriate. We also use this forum to celebrate Star(s) of the Week and to remind people about key learning opportunities available that day or later in the week.
In future posts I’ll drill deeper into each of the other initiatives to describe what we did, the challenges encountered, what worked, what didn’t and what we learned along the way.
Happy Easter!
Thank you for liking this page.
Tim Simpson
18th April, 2019
#LifeAtCapgemini