Creating a culture of learning at a large-scale digital agency

When Australian digital agency DT (now AKQA) chose to merge the UX and UI departments, the team were unclear about what this meant for them. Previously the two disciplines had been silo’d and were unclear about the full range of tasks their colleagues performed.

So, I wrote a handbook of every single tasks the experience department covered. I then asked every team member to grade themselves on their ability to perform each task, as well as their interest in doing so.

I then created a curriculum of lunch and learn training sessions, based on teaching those tasks, that I ran with the leads for a year.

By the time I created the CX capability at AKQA, I created a similar approach and then created skills matrices with the SMEs for every team.

We created evaluation rubrics and scorecards for each team so that they knew what they could learn and how their skills should be measured.

To get the green light to this, I had to communicate how training would impact the value proposition, improve the value architecture and increase profits. I created an annual report for my CX team to prove the value after one year.