Learning at Work Week: Spotlight on Jonathon Brown

Why do you think personal development is so important?
One of the reasons personal development is important is that it ensures we continue to grow. The bar on 'what good looks like' goes up each year, so you need to move forward to just stay the same... Personal development is the way you do that. 

The other reason is that the more you develop, the more you can do, the more you'll enjoy your job and progress. Whatever your ambitions are, you can continue grow and develop in and beyond your role.

How does the Executive team at comparethemarket.com support development?
I believe personal development is owned by the individual – it's not something anyone else can do for you. However, we have a key role to play in making sure that the following happens:

• It stays on the agenda
• There is time and budget to support it
• We give feedback and support to our teams
• We create a culture where development is celebrated
• We create events like Focus on Learning month where people can try new things

There are many ways we support people who want to develop. However, the main one for me is that we need to be able to have honest, well-intended conversations with our teams. We need to understand their ambitions and development needs and give candid feedback (supported by 360 and other feedback tools) to ensure the individual knows what they need to work on. 

We also have a vast array of learning tools from peer coaching, on the job learning, structured development, eLearning and external courses that people can take part in to really stretch themselves. 

I believe in the 70, 20, 10 rule. 70% of development is within role and learning from peers and on the job, 20% is structured training and development internally and 10% is form external courses. It’s too easy for people to think development is signing up, attending and forgetting a course.

What did you take from comparethemarket.com's Focus on Learning Month?
A huge pride of seeing a number of our team deliver such an outstanding event for their colleagues. There were so many great examples of peer learning, as well as people really going above and beyond for the rest of the team. 

What can we do differently next time to make it even better?
Across the month, over 350 colleagues took advantage of over 650 sessions. Learning ranged from Nutrition to Microservices, from Agile to Excel to Digital Marketing. Next year, we need to do even more of what people want, but also mix it up with new content and make even more opportunities to learn in various ways.

What makes comparethemarket.com such a great place to work?
The combination of great people, an amazing brand, some great challenges and the flexibility to work how, when and where we want, is really compelling. Plus, we have such outstanding opportunities to really make a difference for our ourselves, our customers and our communities.

If you like working hard, working at pace and delivering outstanding results for customers and you want to do that in a low ego collaborative way then come and join us!