Weds 18 Jan 2023 11:00am UK time

• Learning and development is a key part of your team’s overall growth and direction.
But how do you make space for that? And how to do you make sure it’s a priority for your people?
Vicky Hockley from Loom Digital is calling on the Agency Hackers hive mind to solve this perennial problem.

Vicky has tried a few different tactics to encourage her team to prioritise their learning and development – but nothing seems to be sticking

Vicky Hockley wants to make more space for her team’s learning and development.

“If we have a busy month or there’s something a client wants doing, personal development tends to get dropped first,” says Vicky, head of people and growth at Loom Digital.

Along with founder Nikki Ellison, they have been looking at different ways to make time for L&D within the agency, as well as encouraging their team to deem it a priority.

So far, they’ve tried things like an agency-wide ‘dark afternoon’, where the whole team focuses on their personal development at the same time – but it didn’t work for everyone.

“For some, the afternoon wasn’t the best time for them,” explains Vicky. “People are receptive to information at different points in the day.”

They’re also changing the way their team can access training budgets.

“We have an agency-wide training budget right now. People can say, ‘I’ve found this’, and it gets taken out of the pot. But actually, people have now said if there was an individual budget, they would know what they have to play with – so we’re implementing that next year.”

Vicky wants to figure out how to make L&D a priority for her people, without it feeling like mandatory training.

“We give ownership to our people on their development, and the areas they want to grow in. But it needs enough structure to be prioritised by them, where they feel they have permission to do it.”

“How do you manage this with lots of different personality types, and the different ways in which people learn?”

Hive mind, assemble: if you’ve found a way to make L&D work for you and your team, come along and help Vicky tackle this conundrum.