Onboarding Developers with Panos Siozos

In this episode, Robin chats with Panos Siozos, co-founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, an e-learning platform allowing companies and individuals to create their own online training school. He shares how the platform is used to onboard their own developers/technical staff, ways to encourage continued learning in a remote environment, and ways to streamline the creation of learning content for your courses.  

“Success is not being defined by all the things we know, or how excellent we are at what we do today, but I guess it’s more determined by how fast we learn and how fast we adapt to the new ways of doing things” – Panos

About Panos Siozos

Panos Siozos has a Ph.D. in Educational Technology, with a specialization in Computer Assisted Assessment. He’s a co-founder and CEO of LearnWorlds; an e-learning company focused on transforming self-paced online learning. He has extensive work experience as a computer science educator and as a software engineer and IT manager.

About LearnWorlds

LearnWorld offers professional trainers, training organizations, and businesses a hassle-free way to create their own, personally branded online school where they can offer courses directly to the public as individual courses, bundles, or subscriptions.

Key Takeaways:

• All employees hired at LearnWorlds go through training by taking courses designed for their job role directly through the LearningWorlds platform. This helps them not only learn about the job, but also gives them firsthand experience of how the platform works and what it’s like to use it.
• Companies that use an online platform for their onboarding program should focus on repurposing existing content that can be shared across the organization. Course content can be created through many channels, such as through recorded internal meetings or webinars created for a specific customer or audience. You can take existing content and reframe it into the context you want to teach it without reinventing the wheel. Learning content doesn’t always need to be polished as long as it’s relevant. Sometimes growth happens too fast to keep up with training content, so repurposing can be sufficient.
• If you provide employees with a place and the infrastructure to exchange ideas and teach each other, growth and continued learning tend to happen organically. People actually like to share what they know and to help other people in turn, helping to create learner and user generated content through discussions and open forums.
  
  “It’s an environment of constant challenges and problem solving this is what drives us forward” – Panos
   
• Even when working remotely, you can engage staff in a culture of learning. You can do this by giving them interesting problems to solve, by communicating expectations and company direction clearly, and by continuing to foster and build personal connections with your team members.
• You can encourage learning and growth with some of your most senior team members by giving them opportunities to teach or mentor more junior staff on the team; thus, giving them a new challenge to keep them engaged.
   

Chapters:

• (00:00:00) Introduction.
• (00:01:47) Who is Panos Siozos and what LearnWorlds does.
• (00:02:35) How LearnWorlds is using their own e-learning platform to onboard new talent.
• (00:05:31) Is polished course content as important as relevant content?
• (00:09:14) How do you get people and teams engaged with generating content?
• (00:12:11) How to embed a culture of continuous learning during the onboarding process.
• (00:17:06) The key to maintaining a learning culture in a fully remote work setting.
• (00:19:50) What opportunities are there for more senior employees to learn and grow?
• (00:24:44) Advice for businesses thinking of transforming their onboarding program.

Links from the podcast:

• Connect with Panos Siozos on LinkedIn
  Learn more about LearnWorlds