“We help other companies find financing for their innovations, and innovation is key for handling the societal challenges we face,”she says. “But the limit of our growth is the availability of talented people. Finding, onboarding, developing them and making sure they're fully engaged, that's our challenge.”

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Investing in its people is at the core of PNO’s learning and development strategy in a way that Wildemans thinks makes the company stand out. “I’ve worked in other HR organizations where it was all about restructuring, efficiency, doing more work with less people, trying to compensate for inflation, and so on. But here, the agenda focuses on how we can grow and develop as a company, but still retain the level of quality we’re valued for in the market.”

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Combining academic knowledge with people skills

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The PNO team is highly educated, with roughly 80-85% of employees having a masters degree or PhD. Academic learning doesn’t instantly provide expertise in the consultancy world though, leaving the company facing a skills gap. “The people that work for us really are experts,” says Wildemans. “But we must help them develop on the consultancy and commercial side. How to interact with clients, how to embrace new business opportunities, how to do cross-selling, and so on.”

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By introducing Lepaya’s academies, Wildemans helps her people focus on the “human element,” so they can bond with clients on a deeper level. “It’s extra important,” she says. “As consultants, they really have to get in there, connect with people and talk with them to thoroughly understand their projects and needs. There has to be some heart there.”

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Using academies for every career level to achieve growth

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The ability to connect with clients and colleagues on a deeper level doesn’t just come naturally – at least not to everyone. It requires a reliable L&D partner and strategy that fulfills an innate desire to develop, grow and have new experiences.

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One-off learning solutions are also not enough to close widening skill gaps and deliver impact. Companies focused on the future, like PNO, are embracing an academies-based approach to learning. By ensuring their people are continuously growing, they provide them with the tools needed to be productive and successful, even in a shifting landscape.

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Every Lepaya academy provides specific learning experiences that can be customized to fit each target group and any organizational context. For a large multinational like PNO, that means having people learn across every Lepaya academy: Young Talent, Professionals, Leaders and Commercial. Embedding learning in the DNA of the organization allows Wildemans to continuously upskill every employee at every career level.

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“What I like about Lepaya is the modular approach,” says Wildemans, “We can say, ‘These are our challenges, these are our target groups, this is our idea of how we would like to help people and facilitate development.’ And then the Lepaya experts say, ‘We can do this for you, and combine it with this module and then we can add this one as well.’ They help us create the learning journey.”

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Wildemans emphasizes that this journey doesn’t stop once learners leave the classroom, either. “The Lepaya learning experience isn’t just ‘train for 3 or 4 hours, go back to your workplace, and do whatever you’ve always done.’ It's also about supporting the transfer from what you learn in a training to your daily reality.

Turning a learning experience into continuous development

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When it comes to helping others with their L&D strategy, Wildemans has a few words of advice. “Don't start with everything that’s possible when it comes to people development. Instead, try to link it to your people strategy. First, you need to identify what makes people successful in the organization and how you, as leadership, can facilitate their development. For us, we noticed that it's not just the content of the training. It’s also the moments that people from various teams and locations have together. There's this community effect of getting to know each other. Also, learning is not a one-off. It’s continuous development.” 

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For learners, it’s the highly relevant content, and the experience of coming together in person, that really makes a difference. John Deckers, a Country Manager at PNO’s Belgian office, says, "For me, the added value of the training was the chance to meet up with peers and being able to discuss and practice different aspects of leadership in a safe environment. I'll apply what I learned by trying to think back to key moments that I experienced during the exercises and roleplays, because they’re really based on what you use in daily operations.”