IDEAS Magazine

Featured Articles

Peer-to-Peer

So You’ve Built a Peer-to-Peer Learning Program… Now What?

Katie Hawkes & Simeon Franklin of Twitter Have 3 Tips to Keep the Momentum Going

Let’s say you’ve created a successful peer-to-peer learning program at your company. Congratulations! If you’ve been up and running for a year or so, you’re likely learning that this is not a once-and-done accomplishment, but a process that will require a fair amount of care and nurturing over the years.

Category: Ideas Author: mary_grace Date: December 12, 2018 9:23 am

Balanced Learning

Balancing Peer-to-Peer Learning with External Conferences at SSENSE

Over the years, companies have tried various strategies to boost employee performance in an overall effort to increase company growth and retention. From bigger paychecks to the prospects of corner offices and 401k plans, all of these can prove to be healthy motivations. But the most important thing in any career path is learning.

Category: Ideas Author: mary_grace Date: November 21, 2018 12:21 pm

Mentorship Program

Three Steps to Launching a Peer Mentorship Program

It’s no secret: growing organizations grow their people. The surprise is ‘how’ and ‘where’ you find and build the ‘personal growth culture’ for your organization.

Your organization’s ‘personal growth culture’ is in the people you currently employ. Enabling your people to learn one-on-one creates a culture of learning. This happens today, often informally. All you need to do is identify who, train them, and deploy them. Developing the person(s) who are doing the work scales the company.

Welcome to ‘re-seeing’ your organization’s greatest assets: the development of your people.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: March 18, 2019 3:47 pm

Democratizing Coaching

Democratizing Coaching at Shopify

How Shopify built and scaled Coaches Corner, with René Moortgat

Shopify has one of the most democratized internal coaching programs. Unlike executive coaching at other companies, anyone at Shopify can sign up for coaching at any time. To enable this at scale, Shopify has a team of full-time coaches.

René Moortgat, Talent Development Operations Specialist at Shopify tells us how he supports the team of coaches in delivering coaching to employees.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: December 18, 2018 4:23 pm

Adopting a New Culture

3 Steps to Drive Adoption of a New Cultural Concept

How Haidee Thanda & Andrew Barrett Introduced PlusPlus and Peer-to-Peer Learning at Shopify

Introducing a new technology or piece of software across a large company is a difficult endeavor. Complexity increases when the company is experiencing hyper-growth and exploring new approaches to promote learning at scale This is exactly the challenge that Haidee Thanda, Learning Platform Architect, and Andrew Barrett, Learning Platform Lead, are tackling at Shopify.

Category: Ideas Author: mary_grace Date: November 29, 2018 12:46 pm

Teach Like and Engineer

Inclusion & Economic Efficiency Go Hand-in-Hand for Jen Gilbert, Tech Learning Manager at Lyft

It’s no longer a question whether a diverse workplace is beneficial. Article after article has proven that a more diverse and inclusive team results in better products as well as a healthier work environment. But what if catering to a diverse audience is also economically efficient?

Jen Gilbert, Tech Learning Manager at Lyft, has spent the past year creating a strong onboarding program that sets their entire engineering team up for success.

Category: Ideas Author: mary_grace Date: November 1, 2018 8:35 am

Foster Learning Environments

3 Ways to Foster a Learning Environment in Your Engineering Team

With Ron Lichty, Consultant and Author

Learning is an essential part of any career path, but especially that of a software engineer. As people responsible for continually building something new, they need to enjoy and be motivated by the challenge of always learning on their feet.

Category: Ideas Author: mary_grace Date: October 24, 2018 8:35 am

How to Spin up and Scale

How to spin up and scale up learning in your organization

Learning as means to an end

First thing first: We are not implementing learning opportunities solely for the sake of learning. Instead, we’re focused on enabling our people to do their best work. This is our promise to them. To that end, learning is a means to removing impediments and helping people have the right skills at the right time so they can get the job done.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: October 17, 2018 2:28 pm

Ron Lichty

Why is Creating a Learning Environment Essential for Technical Teams?

With Ron Lichty, Formerly of Apple and Berkeley Systems

Companies are shifting away from hiring for specific programming skills and know-how in lieu of finding candidates who are adaptable and quick to learn on their feet. But once you find these individuals, it’s crucial that you maintain that learning environment, for the sake of the software engineer as well as the company.

Category: Ideas Author: mary_grace Date: October 10, 2018 12:35 pm

Sharing Knowledge

How to get experts to share their knowledge

People naturally want to share their skills with fellow coworkers. Often, they don’t think they know how. It’s the equivalent of the blank-page syndrome that causes the writer’s block.

It turns out that a bit of a system can help. Here’re a few ideas:

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: July 10, 2018 12:05 pm

Empowering

Empowering the organization with Nazhat Salim of Credit Karma

Nazhat Salim, Talent Development Specialist at Credit Karma, shares how the Talent Development team created and continues to evolve Credit Karma University. A centralized learning program that includes classroom teaching, mentoring and coaching, the goal is to empower the organization and equip teams and individuals with the knowledge and tools they need — not just to do their job but to help others do theirs as well.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: November 15, 2017 4:28 pm

Jessica Amortegui

Adult development theory and leadership effectiveness with Jessica Amortegui of Logitech

Jessica Amortegui, Senior Director of Learning & Development at Logitech, created the Leadership Leap program, which offers an innovative approach to leadership development. Drawing on Robert Kegan’s theory of adult development, the program invites leaders to explore the essence of their identity to achieve personal transformation.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: November 3, 2017 3:34 pm

Simeon Franklin

Taking a holistic approach at Twitter University with Simeon Franklin of Twitter

Simeon Franklin, Staff Technical Instructor at Twitter, is a Program Manager for Twitter University — the technical education program for engineers at the social network. That job involves teaching courses, mentoring instructors and occasionally writing tools for Engineering Effectiveness team.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: October 11, 2017 3:37 pm

Keith Gatto

Applying positive psychology to business with Keith Gatto of UC Berkeley

Positive psychology, the scientific study of strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive, is a field that you might associate more with personal development than with leadership and business. Here Keith Gatto, The Positive Psychology Fellow for the Fung Institute of Leadership at UC Berkeley, describes how he has applied his research in this area to a practical business context to create positive work cultures where innovation can flourish. His Positive Leadership and Innovation program is part of the university’s College of Engineering Executive Education offerings.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: August 29, 2017 3:40 pm

Rajon Tumbokon

The power of feedback and metrics at LinkedIn with Rajon Tumbokon of LinkedIn

Keeping an eye on customer pain points, and finding solutions that will address them, is the best way in which we can ensure that a product is relevant and useful for them. Here Rajon Tumbokon, who leads engineering on-boarding, training and development for engineers at LinkedIn, talks about what they learned from feedback and metrics that led to redesigning their new hire ‘bootcamp’. What follows is how they’ve now embraced a new, more hands-on, learning curriculum and a more iterative training design process.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: July 11, 2017 3:42 pm

Victoria Sevilla

A new approach to leadership development with Victoria Sevilla of VMWare

In an ever-changing business environment, leadership development is more important than ever. Victoria Sevilla is responsible for Leadership Development on the Global People Development team at cloud infrastructure and business mobility software company VMware. She describes how her team is changing the way that leadership development is carried out, and the success of their award-winning Genius Maker program.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: July 6, 2017 3:44 pm

Ceil Tilney

How L&D can learn from marketing with Ceil Tilney

L&D professionals today face a number of challenges within a fast-evolving business landscape. They need to create consistent, up-to-date and high-quality content that engages learners, while demonstrating the value of their training and getting executive buy-in — all with shrinking budgets and small teams. Ceil Tilney, whose career spans learning roles from Microsoft to Bersin by Deloitte, believes the solution may lie in adopting the marketing model of putting the customer first.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: June 7, 2017 3:47 pm