The experience of making this research was very much enjoyable. The search for the thesis topic and the commissioning company started in late August 2020. The contacts and ideation with Awake.AI’s Head of HR led quickly to a common understanding and agreement on the thesis work and its topic in early September 2020. From the beginning it was clear that the researcher’s and Awake.AI’s Head of HR thought like-minded on the view on human beings and learning in general, which was a good starting point for the development work. The topic of the thesis reflects both the real-life needs of a business and personal interests of the researcher who wants to spread the joy of learning.
All in all the communications and collaboration all along the project with Awake.AI was very easy-going. The company believed in the researcher’s competencies and potential to learn along the journey, and it felt that Head of HR at Awake.AI was an equal sparring partner for the researcher. The trust and autonomy given from the company was crucial, as it enabled not only the researcher to discover fresh and innovative solutions with high quality of work done but also to progress in the courses of MBA studies, ending in graduation in June 2021 as planned.
The process of the development work followed the original plan. However, due to the timeframe given and to keep in scope the thesis work, the original idea of releasing one learning element one by one was left to be done in the company internally, and the thesis work was agreed to be completed within the overall prototype of learning paths concept.
Also, it is notable that the whole development project was carried out remotely due to COVID-19 impact.
The journey of creating a scalable learning paths concept was awakening and even healing. As a human resources professional the researcher got confirmation on her strategic human resources management capabilities, learnt loads of new in terms of what comes to a learning organisation, how to drive the “red line” from the strategy to learning and development of people, and on new approaches and tools of service design and learning design. These new skills and competencies in the field of learning and development will be used in the researcher’s future work in HR.
Moreover, this development project strengthened the researcher’s future aspirations on the type of HR jobs and the industry she wants to work in. The researcher’s ways of working felt natural and suitable for a self-managing team in a start-up, where it was useful to work in an agile way, using customer-centric tools to improve things. These
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reflections of the researcher’s self-knowledge can be utilised for instance in her job seeking.
The meetings with different people along the project journey were really pleasant, both in the onboarding interviews and in the benchmarking ones. The researcher succeeded in creating a trustworthy and psychologically safe atmosphere in the interview situations.
Especially the benchmarking interviews had a positive impact on the researcher and it was good to hear ideas from people highly experienced in the field of learning and development, and to hear from others who think like-minded on the topic and on human beings. Partly because of these positive interactions, the researcher even more follows the topic of organisational learning and development in different medias, especially those who are considered as influencers in the field in Finland, to keep on learning more on the topic.
Special acknowledgements of this research go to the researcher’s family. Finalising the thesis work and graduating from MBA studies of Haaga-Helia would not been possible without their loving and endless support throughout the researcher’s own learning path.
63 References
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