It was a grand plan for corporate learning and development. Before the pandemic ended travel and confined everyone to their homes, global energy firm Baker Hughes was ready to conduct 72 in-person, five-day learning events in 2020. Details were planned and tickets booked, said Sean Conley, the chief learning officer at global energy firm Baker Hughes. Of course, those in-person events didn’t happen.

In the earliest days, no one knew how long lockdowns would last, but Conley knew he needed to find a new way to deliver skills and training to the company’s 55,000 employees. A fan of social media, he was inspired by its ability to scale and how it affords everyone the chance to collaborate, learn, and share. 

Using platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Conley designed a program that lets employees be students, coaches, and teachers. “It needed to be a safe environment for people, and it needed to be fun,” he told me in a fireside chat at From Day One’s September virtual conference on giving workers direction about career development. In the grand finale session, Conley shared his community-based approach to learning and its success at Baker Hughes.

Designing a Community-Based Approach to Learning

Conley’s learning community provides three ways for employees to get involved, summarized by the acronym LED: Learn, engage, lead.

Under learn, folks access e-learning courses and curricula they complete on their own. With engage, employees can chat with other learners or get coached. Deliver is an opportunity for employees to teach what they know. Participants choose their learning plans – nothing is prescribed, but everyone has an open invitation. The experience is also gamified: Workers can earn badges by learning, engaging, and leading, and many do so. 

“Our evolution is to let the learners guide the community and run the community,” he said. Meanwhile, his team collects data on how many people participate and at what time, in what regions to optimize the program. “It engages people, and we have scalability now. When we did in-person learning, the population that could go was very small, but now the population is so great and so grand that we’re able to touch more learners now.”

As for quality control, Conley said he’s been successful simply trusting employees to deliver what they know and deliver it well. His team might offer guidance or advice, and presenters get feedback from the audience, but vetting and coaching everyone who wants to lead isn’t feasible in an organization as large as Baker Hughes. Driven by what they know, people tend to rise to the occasion.

Developing Talent Across Business Segments

The company has two primary business segments: one “old school” and one “new school.”

“We play in the entire energy space,” Conley described. “One of the businesses is very traditional – that’s the oilfield business – and you’ve got this other business that is investing in looking at new technologies. But the reason we’re one organization is because those businesses work together. The new energy frontier that’s out there helps our traditional business step up that game, and the traditional business also says ‘Here’s how we develop that talent.’”

Conley says it’s a challenge to get people thinking about how knowledge from one business segment can be added to the other, but he’s found that community-based learning can help. “We have to knock those walls down,” he said. “We were four business segments about a year and a half ago, and now we’re two business segments, so we’re constantly in transition and transformation as an organization.”

Succession planning is always on his mind, he says. Cross-pollinating highly skilled workers across segments is one way to get great employees into vacant positions. “Leadership skills are transferable, but sometimes those technical skills aren't. So in order to do that, we have to make sure we’re developing the technical side of folks as well – giving people exposure and getting them to work closer together.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.