SkillLab Life: What a "Learning Mindset" Means at SkillLab

SkillLab empowers employment & career services with technology that creates equitable labor markets through the universal language of skills. Our mission is to empower people to turn their skills into careers and connect them with jobs and education all over the world.

At SkillLab, we're not just building cutting-edge skills technology – we're building a team of passionate, growth-oriented individuals that support our mission every day with their skills, expertise, talent, and hard work. 

One of the core values that constitutes our work culture, and makes SkillLab such a special place to work, is our learning mindset. A learning mindset is a way of thinking where you believe that your abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort, learning, and dedication. People with a learning mindset embrace challenges, persist through setbacks, and see failures as opportunities for growth. They are curious, open to new ideas, and constantly seek to expand their knowledge and skills. But, as someone who is interested in working at SkillLab, you might wonder what this actually means in practice.

Learning is a journey, a continuous development. Today’s work landscape is constantly changing, and so are the skills needed to thrive in it. That's why we're committed to providing SkillLabers with resources they can use to invest in their professional growth. We believe that having a learning mindset especially in the innovative world of the tech industry is important. This is why a learning mindset is one key criteria we look for among new candidates for different roles and career levels. Feel free to read more about our hiring process here. 

Let’s dive deeper: 

• SkillLabers get an annual personal learning and development budget that SkillLabers can freely spend on their professional development. The learning budget can be flexibly spent on anything that supports someone’s professional growth such as courses, books, conferences, language classes but also therapy. By prioritizing mental health and providing access to therapy, we can create a healthier and more supportive workplace for all. 
• SkillLabers have access to mentors & coaches (SkillLab is part of the Google for Startups SDG accelerator). SkillLabers can easily request a session with a Google mentor through the use of a platform and they can receive feedback or support for new projects or workflows they design etc.
• SkillLabers come together during regular lunch learning exchanges once in a month and listen to a colleague with expertise on specific topics and explore new work knowledge or skills. Examples of lunch learning exchanges include listening to our Data Science Lead to talk about Generative AI or our Internal Operations Lead sharing tips about Giving and Receiving feedback at the workplace. 
• Feedback and collaboration culture: People say feedback is a gift and at SkillLab we couldn't agree more. This is why we have established a bi-annual 360 degree feedback cycle where SkillLabers receive and give feedback from their peers and team lead, and discuss their performance in the past six months. Celebrating our achievements and accomplishments is very important together with identifying our areas of improvement and planning our next learning steps. 
• Engineering huddles: Some teams run bi-weekly huddles focused on specific domains, such as Back-end and Front-end huddles. These sessions are used as a forum to discuss codebase and process improvements and to share best practices, with engineers taking ownership of driving solutions. This helps keep our standards high and ensures continuous improvement across the codebase.

Training for people leaders: Stepping into a people leadership role is a major career move. At SkillLab, we want to ensure that our new people leaders have the skills to succeed. That's why our training program focuses on teaching new people leaders to manage, lead and coach others. New leaders are trained by experienced team leads through an 8-session program that spans 6 months. Existing team leaders participate in half-day training sessions quarterly, covering pressing topics like team building, performance reviews, career conversations, and coaching. Read more about our team leadership approach in this blogpost.

We believe that learning is a mindset.  Lifelong learning is about embracing challenges, seeking new knowledge, experimenting, seizing opportunities to develop and constantly becoming your best self. Also, embracing a forward looking stance in work life is important for us. Yes, mistakes can be made, processes can fail, certain things can go wrong but instead of getting fixated in the past or looking at whom to blame, we aim at using these learnings and focusing on the future, building the next great thing! 

If you're passionate about continuous learning and want to join a team that values growth, we encourage you to explore our vacancies in our Careers page or follow us on our LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you!