Marcelo Ancelmo

Hi everyone. Welcome to this lightning talk, where I'm going to present how we are cultivating a learning culture at KPMG Switzerland.

My name is Marcelo Ancelmo, and I'm Head of Solution Architecture at KPMG Switzerland.

KPMG Switzerland is part of the KPMG global network, and we have more than 100 years of presence in the Swiss market providing professional services to our clients.

Continuous development is a cycle that always starts with leadership support. It creates internal opportunities for learning and encourages external participation, and focuses heavily on communication and collaboration at all.

Starting with leadership, we have learning and knowledge sharing as key performance indicators for everyone that's part of our company. We also have training programs tailored for each role, and we encourage any requests for training or participation in external events.

Leadership support also means setting the example. We have our tuning sessions where Dinkar Gupta, our CIO and CTO, not only reads the book, but provides contextual examples on how the learnings that are present in those books apply to our day-to-day.

Mentoring for us is a top priority. In our case, we do matches of mentors and mentees, but we also let mentees get in control and decide who they want to be their mentor and what are the learning activities that they want to perform during their mentorship.

And we also provide dedicated time to learn to all employees. Everyone is able to protect some time on their agendas that are dedicated to learning. This time to learn is always discussed in our own one-on-ones. It is a time that is protected, it is aligned with our KPIs, and it is focused on any learning activity that is important for our employees.

Anyone can start and organize a learning group if they have any common learning objectives that they want to achieve, or a working group in cases where they need to find out solutions to problems that they are currently facing.

Besides learning groups and working groups, we also have different communities of practice where anyone can join and exchange knowledge by practicing using external scenarios or examples from the industry, and invite external guests to present and exchange.

You are also entitled to request, plan, prepare, and deliver your own training. So if anyone has any specific interest or knowledge that they want to share, they can at any time prepare a training and deliver it to the whole team.

We also have our internal event, KPMG ACH Technology Days, where anyone can present about any topic related to technology, where we invite other KPMG member firms to present, and sometimes we have external guest speakers presenting.

We encourage participation in external events, not only as attendees, but as speakers and practitioners. And when you are back, we want to hear about how was the experience.

We also strongly believe in collaboration to move forward through the communities. Active participation in community-oriented events, membership in industry working groups, organization of external events dedicated to community are always highly appreciated.

We have an internal newsletter that is used as internal communication to everyone on what's happening, why we are contributing, what opportunities are available, and what's coming next.

And we use our internal social network to spread information about articles, news, and ways to collaborate on conversations.

Our key learning outcomes at this point are: you need to learn by doing at all levels, from the engine room up to the penthouse. Example is important and paramount for success of any learning initiative.

You give choice to people. Let them decide what works for them. Self-service and self-organization gives freedom to learn.

And learning is not optional. Learning is an act that never exhausts the mind and is key for success.

Thank you.