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\n \n {{ a }}\n \n Stephanie Szabó\n \n
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\n \n When I began my Design career, the barriers to entry were great.\n Education was expensive, portfolios required experience, and\n access to knowledge was inequitable. While some of these hurdles\n have lessened — it’s still hard to grow in your practice once you\n work, because the value of professional development is not widely\n understood. This is precisely why after years of practicing as a\n Designer, I made the transition to Educator; I saw an opportunity\n to positively influence and make systematic changes to adult\n education.\n
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\n Learning at work matters\n
\n\n Look around and you’ll see that learning as a discipline is\n sprouting all over business. As organizations strive to gain a\n competitive advantage and adapt to the future of hybrid work –\n there’s a greater need to align and develop employees.\n Organizations that value learning will develop an ecosystem of\n educational opportunities such as\n onboarding to ramp-up employees (a fit and retention\n lever), continuous education to improve their managers’\n people leadership skills (an HR lever) or training to\n educate communities on processes or policies (a compliance lever).\n For organizations that require further specialization of their\n workforce, another type of learning is on the rise:\n functional education.\n
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\n Enter functional education\n
\n\n Functional education focuses on the technical and increasingly\n perishable skills of a discipline. This type of learning is\n imperative for product-related roles in the Tech industry because\n they require constant upskilling to stay current. Most people find\n it sobering to learn that the average shelf life of technical\n skills is quite short. Some research suggests that it is roughly\n less than\n
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\n Design Learning at Airbnb\n
\n\n We launched the Design Learning program within Airbnb to help our\n team blossom in their creative craft. Cultivating in-house\n expertise is worth the squeeze, because learning within our shared\n context immediately makes education more resonant and applicable\n for Airbnb. Our learning strategy is specifically rooted in craft\n – because it’s ultimately the strongest lever the Design function\n can contribute to the company. But what exactly is craft?\n
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\n Craft is a cliche term that’s hard to explain in a fresh\n way. For Airbnb’s Design Learning program, craft is the 1% of\n details that unlock the remaining 99% of the experience.\n\n
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\n With less than a year under our belt, we’ve seen a huge appetite\n for the learning of Design – both within and beyond the function.\n Over ⅕ of the entire company across 18 global offices have\n completed at least one course. Open enrollment to all employees\n means we’re not just educating our Design team, we’re educating\n our cross-functional peers on how to make better Design-led\n decisions. Our learners choose from a catalogue of 16 unique\n Design courses and 91% of them agree that “participating in the\n Design Learning program helps me grow at Airbnb”. All of this was\n accomplished in just a few short months, with less than $3K spent,\n amidst a global pandemic and with a Design Learning team of one.\n So how did we do it?\n
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\n Going behind the scenes\n
\n\n If there’s anything we learned from launching an education program\n from 0-1, it’s that cultivating stakeholder commitment is the\n single most important thing you can do to ensure learning has\n longevity. We recognize there’s a lot to learn about functional\n education and we don’t have all the answers. Our hope is that by\n sharing the behind the scenes we can advance the practice of\n Design. That said, here are the three high-level stakeholder\n challenges we encountered when building our education program and\n how we tackled them.\n
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\n 1. Commitment from the organization\n
\n\n Organizations may say that they want to weave learning into\n their culture, but after that, the details can get hazy. Be\n prepared for stakeholders to have different responses to\n learning, and that some might not care about it at all. While\n developing curriculum is tangible and teaching learners is\n satisfying — all that is irrelevant if you don’t have nuanced\n clarity on two key questions: “What’s the value of learning?”\n and “Who benefits from learning?”\n
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\n \n Course Impact Reports used for influence\n
\n\n\n Our Approach. Find metrics that matter. Then, tie\n your learning offerings to influence these desired outcomes. When\n our program began it was so new that we couldn’t get our\n stakeholders to connect program participation with performance\n reviews. We didn’t have the time, track record or even an LMS\n (Learning Management System). In response to our team’s budding\n learning culture, we designed Course Impact Reports as a\n form of influence. Each report acts as a snapshot of the learning\n experience that describes the course, highlights data like\n behavioral change and sentiment like learner quotes. Two weeks\n before performance review season each report is emailed to\n Managers with a personal message to provide them context and fuel\n for Talent calibrations. Creating these reports is a heavy manual\n lift but they’ve also proven to be one of our most successful and\n scrappy communication tools. Stakeholders can now see the impact\n of our education no matter their level of their involvement.\n
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\n 2. Commitment from leaders\n
\n\n There are so many ways for an organization’s leaders to support\n learning: sponsorship, resourcing, budget and participation are\n just a few. However we learned early on that the most engaged\n program audience would not be leaders, it was Design ICs. This\n makes sense given their responsibilities; ICs are often the ones\n doing the craft and developing new skills is a vehicle for\n growth. We needed Design leadership to be equally engaged.\n
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\n \n Design Courses created by our Curriculum Steering Teams\n
\n\n\n Our Approach. In response to our teams’ mixed\n engagement needs we created Curriculum Steering Teams.\n These rotating teams of 5-7 SMEs (subject matter experts) lead\n seven different focus areas of Design and are curated for diverse\n functional expertise. Each team has a main representative that\n liaises between the group and the Design Learning program, while\n the rotating composition allows for anyone to influence the future\n of their craft. Having learning representatives from all corners\n of the Design function allowed us to amplify unheard voices and\n integrate bigger visions into our trajectory. It also meant that\n we had representation from every leader’s part of the Design\n function. It’s not a perfect solution to get all leaders’\n commitment to learning, but it does scale equity and education\n very well.\n
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\n 3. Commitment from learners\n
\n\n From my experience educating graduate students to executives,\n how learning is presented can be just as important as what\n learning is presented. When polling the Design team about their\n preferences, we discovered that 73% of our team wanted learning\n to be like studio time: dedicated practice of hands-on\n application with real-time feedback on their craft from peers.\n This preference contradicted many popular (and frankly more\n scalable) learning formats such as lectures, speaker series and\n pre-recorded videos to watch alone. We also learned that while\n exposure from external perspectives was desired, the ability to\n “work with top talent at Airbnb” was a major catalyst for\n conversion and retention. We don’t yet know the specific reasons\n for these preferences but our hunch is it has to do with\n dialogue. The rapid back and forth of ideas – through oral,\n auditory or visual learning styles – is how subjective work\n often improves and how the culture of critique often works in\n Design. Learning this way has positively contributed to our\n teams’ sense of belonging as we continue to work more remotely.\n
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\n Our Approach. In response to our Design\n function’s learning format needs, we knew we needed learning to be\n led by other Designers. So, we created a\n Community of Facilitators. Approximately ¼ of the Design\n team are nominated to learn the art form of facilitation and guide\n their peers’ learning. Each Design Course we offer is hosted live\n by a Facilitator and based on a “learn by doing” approach to\n craft. Reflection also plays an important role to encourage\n communal learning. We aim for an 80/20 model of lean-in\n (contribute) vs lean-back (reflect) learner engagement. We\n designed our language to promote inclusivity; avoiding terms like\n Faculty or Non-Designer and instead use terms\n like Facilitator and Design for Everyone. We\n even have Facilitators from Engineering and Product Management\n co-host courses on cross-functional topics like Inclusive Design\n and Service Design. To date we’ve seen an overall facilitation\n effectiveness rate of 91% given to our community of 50+\n Facilitators. We’re clear that our learners love this approach to\n experiential learning, however it requires well-designed\n incentives to effectively scale this model of peer facilitation.\n
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\n Commit to Learning\n
\n\n Where most learning programs fail – is a lack of commitment.\n Organizations need to commit to the culture of learning. Leaders\n need to commit to backing learning programs, and learners need to\n commit to learning. Functional education programs like ours may\n have started as corporate upskilling mechanisms, but they’re\n quickly becoming a mainstream staple of adult education. While\n conferences, certificates and degrees will always have a place in\n professional development – the unique value of learning directly\n from a company is that it occurs at the pace of their intellectual\n property and in our case, from and with the craft-based expertise\n of the Airbnb Design team.\n
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\n We’d love to hear how you’re approaching the learning of Design –\n whether you’re a leader or learner. Feel free to\n reach out to us\n with your creative critique.\n
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\n \n Anyone not allowed in America is welcome on Airbnb. We are\n providing free housing to refugees and anyone affected by the new\n travel ban. If you or someone you know is in need of accommodation\n as a result of this new policy, please contact\n brian.chesky@airbnb.com with details\n regarding your situation. If you are able to host these\n communities in need via Airbnb, you can sign up\n here. For more information regarding our long term\n efforts go here.\n
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