Adaptive learning at Sinch: development supported by culture
Tags: Culture, Learning, Leadership, Learning And Development

Adaptive learning at Sinch: development supported by culture Sinch Follow Jun 17 · 4 min read

Hello! My name is Jon Kramer, and I have a passion for creating solutions to help people learn and develop at Sinch. I’m originally from the United States, but I’ve been living happily in Stockholm since 2000. My wife and I have two children: a teenage daughter and a preteen son. Last summer, we received a new member to our family, a Chihuahua. Now that you know me better, it’s time to understand what I do at Sinch.

The main goal of the Learning function at Sinch is to make sure that people have the best performance in their positions. And for this to happen, learning is key. We believe that Sinchers’ motivation to continuously develop is essential to achieve greater personal and professional goals, and to deliver better experiences to customers.

In the learning area, we create valuable experiences for people: all new Sinchers are integrated into the company through onboarding sessions, where we talk about culture, business, history, and products, which are important skills for the insertion of the person in our world.

This integration is important so all new Sinchers feel like a part of our culture and company, and become productive in their new roles as soon as possible. We have also developed strategic training initiatives related to Sinch’s global business objectives, and this is done precisely so that everyone has enough baggage to get integrated with the team and quickly work to make things happen.

In Learning, we work together with other areas, such as culture support, integration, and business. We have always stressed that each Sincher is responsible for their actions, and that we apply the highest ethical standards to differentiate ourselves. If we are not making an impact, we rethink the approach, and adaptive learning means that we, as an organization, must always adapt to change and learn how to navigate through changes.

More specifically, adaptive learning at Sinch means:

● Learning in the flow of work

● Collaboration

● Customization

● Highly targeted programs

● Understanding the future of work

This is based on the 70:20:10 Learning and Development framework, a model that emphasizes three types of learning: experiential, social, and formal, and the mutual relationship between them. This makes our people’s goals of professional development a mixture of 70% work experience, 20% learning through social collaboration, and 10% formal, strategic learning initiatives such as courses and other training.

And around here, people are able to have this mix of different learnings as part of our professional development. And they are naturally curious and learn new things when they are intrinsically motivated. Thus, when people are getting results and success in their roles at Sinch, they are encouraged to continually be experts in the subject — and this is one of the ways our culture sustains the development of our people.

In addition, we encourage experiences to be shared with teammates and stakeholders — which helps us to win together. We value achieving results through the well-done execution of our goals: the structure helps us to work together and make things happen, learning together and delivering value through our work.

We recently launched a strategic training of our conversational messaging product, Conversation API. The training is aimed at our Sales people, but all Sinchers can use it to better understand why conversational messages are so important to our customers.

This training, for example, will help our sales people to better understand the product and how to introduce it to new and existing customers. This is because conversational messaging is the biggest paradigm shift that occurs in communication between brands and customers.

An important thing that I learned throughout my journey in Learning is to be curious and to learn something new every day, no matter how big or small it is. And to share your new knowledge with others.

And that changes the game. A, round here we build trust through open and honest relationships. It’s all a matter of team: inclusion, respect and sharing our knowledge to empower everyone for personal growth. We collaborate, we have fun, and we’re stronger together. Finally, we have a lot of knowledge in here, and also, people are driven by curiosity. They know that there is no failure, only continuous learning and development.