How Flint upskilled ambitious GoCardless employees.

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How Flint upskilled ambitious GoCardless employees.

“Even taking out the social good, this was massively beneficial for James and Sam who learnt a host of new skills organising and managing the placement.”
Joe Robins — Head of International Development

We’ve written up GoCardless’s experience of taking on a work experience student for the first time.

Sara with Sam and James

Key benefits:

• Opportunity for junior staff to build an entirely new process from scratch
• Improved skills (time management, importance of feedback)
• Teaching staff to be mentors.

GoCardless is one of the UK’s biggest tech success stories coming 8th on this year’s Deloitte’s 2017 UK Technology Fast 50 list. They process recurring payments for the likes of The Guardian, Sage and Bulb Energy.

A development opportunity for top performing junior staff

A commitment to learning and development is a huge part of company culture at GoCardless and something which their Head of International Development, Joe Robins, invests heavily in. When they took in Sara, a student at Globe Academy, Sam and James had been at the company for a year and were already getting heavily involved in training new staff members. The placement offered Sam and James (Sara’s mentors) a chance to work on skills they don’t usually have to use in their day job. Joe was really happy with how much responsibility they took on.

The skills Sam learnt during the placement

Sam felt he benefited in 3 key ways as a consequence of mentoring someone for the first time:

• Time management. This was something Sam had been working on for a while. As he commented, ‘having to ensure Sara was having a valuable and productive time at GoCardless forced me to condense my day to day activities. I found that with prioritisation of key tasks I could be more efficient in the time I had and achieve much more with my day overall.’
• Introduction to mentorship. As Sam commented, ‘I enjoyed the informal mentorship of coaching Sara without the direct pressure of being a manager. It allowed for a really collaborative and relaxed learning environment that I would like to replicate in the future.’
• Value of Feedback. Having Sara in really taught Sam about the importance of feedback. As he explains ‘Flint advised me to spend some time at the end of each day reviewing what Sara had done, what she’d found interesting and what she wanted to do the next day. I’d never really realised how important it is to review things before and reflect on the day.’

How having Sara in changed things at GoCardless

What surprised GoCardless was the actual benefits of having a young person come in. Part of Sam’s role is to onboard new sales development reps. As a direct result of seeing how effective daily one on ones were, Sam has now implemented this for all new graduate hires. In addition, on her last day, Sara (who’s originally from the Dominican Republic) sat down with GoCardless’s CTO, Carlos, and suggested a number of improvements to their Spanish website. As Carlos commented, ‘Having Sara for few days was really helpful to identify improvements in our website that we hadn’t picked up on. Having a fresh pair of eyes to look into your business provides you with really valuable insights and a new perspective.’ The whole team were so impressed with Sara that they would now looking to take on more work experience students in the future!

If you’re interested in giving a young person a chance for a week and having a fresh perspective on your business, feel free to contact us on benm@zinc-mission1.com.