Analytics leaders share how they build learning into daily work. Mark's team gives new hires DataCamp licenses and runs hackathons and boot camps. Denise Russell at Booking.com measures platform engagement monthly and uses mentorship, internal conferences, and learning resources scattered throughout the office.
Chapters
A lot of you have mentioned a few things, right? Peer to peer learning, community and culture, embedding learning as part of the daily work and the culture. And Mark, you just mentioned here something really important. Encouraging people to learn and experiment. And maybe as a follow up here, I'd love to see some examples of how your teams or organizations are embedding learning and daily work. What does that look like in practice? Mark, I'll start with you.
So a number of things. So first thing that that my team get, when you join the team, everybody gets a complimentary Data Camp license for everybody. They're encouraged to use it, the technical skills. So they're really encouraged to make time and space for it. And we share time with Data Camp. We've been to your offices in the Empire State, we've had you over here in Jersey City and we've watched a game together in our bar. We're a sports company at the end of the day to improve that. And yeah, so part of that is again having fun and enjoyment. But also we run hackathons with you. So trying new things, just stretching the minds. We also do a lot of stuff. We also brought in a whole week where we did data consultancy skills, presentation and stuff. The 20 people that went on that, we encourage that to filter down. So that happens. And today we've had everybody in the office and we have three or four presentations where people who want to share some of the work they've done. And so all of that encourages people to learn from each other and collaborate and stretch their minds.
Yeah, that's great. And maybe Denise Russell, how is learning look like and the kind of in the flow of work for employees@booking.com and MNS. I'll start with you, Denise.
Thank you. Yes. I think it's building up what Mark said right here at Booking. Hackathons are also a prominent format.
Right.
And I would say there's no escape because we have so much formats and platforms for them to explore that we're really catering all their preferences and really formats.
Right.
Of how they like to learn. So we also measure quite often engagement on different platforms. Right. We take also monthly meetings with Data Camp to understand the data.
Right.
What's the data telling us? We also have a lot of. This group actually creates their own internal conference. So they're super engaged. Right. On top of that we allow them to go to external conferences as well. So it's just really plenty of formats for them to explore. Like I said, they can even be mentors and internal trainers. So I would say there's no escape.
Right.
There is everywhere learning opportunity. We have books everywhere. So it's very present, very embedded here in the physical environment here at the campus as well. Right.
I feel like a tagline for a learning culture. There is no escape. Really sets the, sets the scene for the wider organization. There is no escape from learning. Russell?
Yeah.
Maybe share with us how, how does the learning and the flow of work look like for M S?
Yeah, I mean to double down on a couple different points. Number one, the hackathon concept is great. You know, I mean I've. I've had the privilege of sort of seeing that work at a couple of different companies. You know, when I was at Facebook. Where that sort of culture comes from. I think originally certainly do the same sort of thing over at M and S. I think it's just, it gives visibility and some time and a safe space for people to basically not just produce ideas. Right. Which is sort of the core part of the hackathon culture, but also just to meet other like minded people that are sort of movers and shakers. Those thousand points of light, those peer to peer sort of interactions that Denise was talking about earlier, I think that's really a lot of the positive value. We also do a couple other things on the team. All of my heads of here. We all have presentation parts of our KPIs or goals. Very much in each one teach one kind of mentality. We're expected to be evangelists as much as we are expected to be data scientists. I think it's an important part of the role. It's no good sort of being in the back closet somewhere crunching up models and spreadsheets and dashboards. I mean, you've got to be out there educating and sort of inspiring people to get excited about not just data, but what it can do in an organization.
