As part of Learning at Work week, we’re sharing some of the ways we support our team to learn. Next up this week, our Data and Insight Manager, Geraldine, talks us through our ‘Learning Bank’.
The approach to learning is totally different to places I’ve worked at before. It’s taken very seriously here and it’s been described as one the core pillars of the organisation. Learning has been a longstanding value of YSF and the Learning Bank appears to have moved that forward and developed it even further.
Our ‘Learning Bank’ is a bespoke platform that we developed to capture our learnings, reflections, stories, resources, and things that have happened. It provides the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind the numbers that we input to our learning and performance system. I’m here providing maternity cover for Emma Gooch, who led on getting the learning bank in place. We had a need for a way of measuring our performance and reflecting on what we’d done, and what was out there wasn’t going to meet our needs.
Our team can post articles easily and put them into different categories that can be filtered when people are looking for something to read. Everyone else can read what they’ve had to say, leave comments and spark conversation around how we do things. Everybody can reflect individually, but the success of this is sharing it with a broader audience in the hope they’ll reflect too. That creates a domino effect that you can’t necessarily get by storing and collating information in other ways.
There’s more than 300 articles on there now, so for someone like me who was new into the team, I’ve found it really useful as a hub of information. If I’m doing work around Active Lives or specific to Sheffield, for example, I can go and hunt that out. As well as a good number, there’s also a really good variety. For example, someone has written on there about their experiences of learning to swim.
Another of our values is trust, and when you’re posting reflective thoughts, you’re potentially putting yourself in quite a vulnerable position. But this platform adds to that feeling of a safe environment to be open with each other.