Making learning at work pay

But a few years back, when we thought about how we (Desq) learn at work, we decided it was time to commit to something and introduce Desq Learning Days.

Four times a year everyone at Desq gets a whole day to dedicate to learning something new, or developing skills. The impact and potential is huge, and for Learning at Work Week that year we wanted to share what we know to encourage everyone to do something similar. 

Why commit to learning at work?

We’re a small busy team and four days a year is a lot to take away from project and other work! But we’re feeling the benefit… We pool learning from our learning days to help us all to get the best out of topics we’ve chosen – in 2023 alone we’ve covered topics like making best use of Three.js, optimising Evolve theming and article styles, Webflow’s potential to support bespoke resources, how MS Intune can help ensure consistent cyber security, Universal design, accessibility standards and emerging practice, and making best use of Blender for motion graphics, 2D and 3D animation and video editing...

Aside from building these banks of shared insight, there are other huge pay-offs:
Learning make us better at our jobs, feeds confidence, and enables our innovation and creativity.

New skills are making work easier, more effective, inventive or engaging (great news for us, our clients and our output)

By sharing what we’ve learnt across the team, the benefits are exponential – one person’s learning can teach the whole team.

We’re specialists in different disciplines – it’s really good to learn about our colleagues and their talents.

How we make the most of one person’s learning.

If all goes according to plan, our learning days create more that 350 hours of learning each year. Here’s how we milk it!

By sharing:

• At the end of learning day we get together to each give a summary or demo of what we’ve learned
• We document key points, links, resources and share in a learning bank
• We use weekly team meetings to do short showcases and share more
• We might write papers, guides for clients or build something we’ve learnt into a work process

By letting project needs inspire choices:

• We might choose our learning topic based on a forthcoming project
• Or we might be inspired by big shifts in tech that will impact our clients
• We might pick up on something that would’ve enabled us to do a project better

By taking inspiration from our clients’ worlds:

• Remember the pandemic? We did a lot of learning, thinking and talking about hybrid learning – sometimes big changes bring focus.
• And AI – that’s our focus this learning day – because it’s going to transform the world of learning design and content creation.
• We use an R&D channel and workshop sessions to record ideas as they come up, and refer back in prep for learning day.

And finally, the human benefit!

Maybe the best thing is that by sharing, across a small team of really varied specialist skills, we all get a glimpse into the working worlds of our colleagues. When everyone’s busy getting on with things, it’s easy to lose sight of each other, but it’s a really good reminder of the skills and talent that make up our team.

So, from experience, we’d say go for it. Attend a webinar. Better still, get to a workshop or event in real life, where you get the added bonus of connecting to a whole community in your specialism! Read a book. Get lost down the rabbit holes of desk research. Have lunch with someone who knows more and better than you, and share it.