#AskScout24: Introduction of Scout24Academy

Tamara Trösken, People Development Manager at Scout24, knows how important continuous development is for content employees and a successful company. For this purpose, she and her team have designed and implemented a comprehensive training initiative: the Scout24Academy.

What is the Scout24Academy and since when is it part of the company?

Tamara: At the beginning of 2018 we set up a new People Development strategy. That was the moment the Scout24Academy idea was born. Our goal was to implement a “pool” for all learning and development measures. In the following months we worked a lot on this idea and developed processes with our Scout24Academy training partner and with procurement and accounting in order to make the processes as simple as possible for our employees.

With Quarterly Dialogue 3 in June 2018 we brought the Scout24Academy to life and with it a training booklet with around 20 training offers. By implementing a new feature in the Quarterly Dialogue, the MyDevelopment Talk, we are now able to analyse the development needs within the company, which was a very important step for us. Based on this first companywide need analysis and the feedback of our Scouts we were able to increase our training offer in the booklet to around 45 trainings.

With every quarterly dialogue we further elaborate the Scout24Academy and create a working environment that will enhance the learning and development experience for our Scouts.  

A Scout can participate in the Academy but also play an active part in it. How does it work?

Tamara: Development measures can be offered by external providers as well as by Scout employees. This is called Peer-to-Peer enablement. A Scout who would like to offer a peer-to-peer training to share his/her knowledge within Scout24 can consider offering an internal training, in coordination with the manager.

There are already many Scouts who support the Scout24Academy and it was fun to work crossfunctionally on this project as one team with our Learning & Development ambassadors! In addition, I could benefit from gaining project lead and project work experience.

Why do you think it’s important to offer such an initiative as a company?

Tamara: People Development is one of the central success factors for companies. Especially the generation of the Millennials wants to work in an environment with a strong learning and development culture. The more we invest in learning and development the more attractive could Scout24 be for new employees and benefit of a higher commitment. Another fact is that – especially in the digital world – knowledge changes very fast. That’s why it’s so important for us to develop our skills and our knowledge constantly. The Scout24Academy supports our Scouts to increase their skills and can contribute to our company goal “Business Growth”. Experts say that already 5 % learning time has an impact on revenue!

What has been an absolute highlight so far?

Tamara: To be honest – for me there are two highlights. On the one hand, it’s the moment when I saw our finished Scout24Academy logo for the first time, because this transformed the project to the “real” Scout24Academy. And on the other hand, I was very proud when the process we’ve worked on for so long was visible for the organisation in Quarterly Dialogue 3 and to see how well the process worked in the first run.

What is planned for the future?

Tamara: The goal is to bring the Scout24Academy to the next level. One important step will be the implementation of the Scout24Academy Learning Management Platform. It gets much easier to book trainings but also to use e-learning content.