Never Stop Growing: Inside Hudl’s Investments in Professional Development
Since Hudl’s founding in 2006, we’ve really never stopped growing. Every year we add new products, grow our workforce, expand into new countries, you get the picture. And with growth top of mind for our company, we want to make growth top of mind for our employees too.
“To succeed in todays environment, companies must constantly innovate and evolve to stay on the cutting edge,” said Janell Hager, senior director of talent management. “In order to stay sharp and relevant, Hudlies must constantly grow their skill sets, which is why we're making professional development a strategic priority. Employee development not only helps to ensures our team stays well-informed on trends, best practices and new skills, but development is known to boost employee engagement and helps to attract top talent.”
We’re doubling down on our investment for internal professional development in a few key areas:
On-Demand Learning
Everyone is busy, and it can be hard to find the time to work on your own development. But with a variety of learning opportunities available whenever they’re needed, we’ll better equip our employees to focus on their development at their own pace.
First off, we reserve one hour per month for Hudl employees to spend on their own growth and development goals. We call it “GOAL hour” for “go online and learn,” and we even block it off on everyone’s calendars as a reminder. This way employees can feel comfortable pausing all other tasks and dedicate that time to learning. Like, say, taking a Hudl U class.
That’s right, Hudl University, aka Hudl U, is back! Hudl U connects Hudl employees who want to learn with Hudlies who want to teach. Our course catalog involves programming that hits on several “schools” of learning: business, technology, professional development, leadership and fun (because you gotta have some fun).
A few examples of the courses available:
- American Football 101, led by Greg Nelson (SVP, Competitive and Head Coach at Lincoln Lutheran) and Brett Shamblin (Director, Sales and assistant coach at Lincoln Lutheran)
- Understanding Hudl’s Stock, led by David Graff (CEO)
- Audience Driven Content Development, led by Kelly Mosier (Sr. Director, Hudl Media)
- Financial Acumen, led by Brady Nikolas (Sr. Accountant)
- Hudl’s Video Infrastructure, led by Casey Bateman (Principal Engineer)
These classes are available live, at a set time, or to watch later using software that helps us build and deploy the curriculum. The first Hudl U course kicked off in mid-May and we’ll continue to scale the program with new offerings every quarter.
We’re dedicated to making sure we offer the best options to our employees. For example, we were recently reviewing our offerings—based on that employee feedback, we’ve switched to a new learning platform: Eduflow. It’s user-friendly, allows for interactive collaboration, fast and easy course creation, analytics, and robust data security.
We also just announced a new online corporate library that will give everyone access to works from well-known publishers. The selection of ebooks and audiobooks was curated based on what employees want to read, on topics like continuous learning, empowering creativity, nurturing inspiration and promoting wellbeing. Think of a library created for Hudl employees, by Hudl employees!
Enhanced Manager Training
We’re all about investing in our managers—we consider them coaches, not just managers, because they’re responsible for leading their reports toward growth and mobility at Hudl.
We started by building a scalable management framework based on a foundation of management competencies. These management competencies serve as guideposts for expected skills and behaviors for leaders across the organization, and we’ve used them to establish a baseline for manager effectiveness via a new upward feedback survey we launched in June.
Managers also have specific training and development opportunities to help shore up any competency gaps and continue strengthening performance. We’ve partnered with an industry leader in leadership development to help us build our management development programming.
In order to organize who gets what, we’ve bucketed managers by level: emerging, supervisors to senior managers, and directors +. Each group will have specific programming, addressing things like management essentials, phases of the manager lifecycle, and those management competencies we mentioned, plus several on-demand resources to apply in daily management.
Scaled and Individual Learning Opportunities
We’ve covered on-demand learning and more resources for managers, but what about experiences for teams, departments, even the whole company? We’re focused on those too. We want to give employees unique, impactful learning experiences that are still tailored to their needs.
Did you hear about Hudl Week? Not sure how you could miss it (it was all over our social networks!), but in case you did, it was a week-long, company-wide event where everyone came together in person, for the first time in years. We brought in world-class speakers that expanded our intercultural communication skills, deepened connections with our customers and got all our employees fired up for the future of Hudl.
“We designed the week to reinforce our strategy, help the team connect, and build energy for the rest of the year,” said Haleigh Broulliette, corporate communications manager. “It’s important for us to intentionally step away from the day-to-day throughout the year so we can think about where we’re going as a company and as individuals.”
And this type of experience is exactly the scalable learning opportunity we’re talking about. We can’t do Hudl Week every other week, so we’ll also be supporting large team events through a professional development budget for VPs to use on speakers, training and to selectively deploy for individual development opportunities (conferences, workshops, etc. that aren’t otherwise covered in our corporate offerings).