Cultivating a Culture of Continuous Learning at RapidSOS

At RapidSOS, continuous learning is critical to achieve our vision of empowering safer, stronger communities with intelligent, data-driven emergency response worldwide. That’s why we invest time and resources that enable our team to achieve its goals. 

Our approach to Learning and Development is informed by best practices from subject matter experts combined with insights and observations from our team at RapidSOS. Here’s what we believe:

• Learning and Development is a critical enabler of company success: To excel and expand our work connecting the world to public safety with our emergency response data platform, we must stay on top of our industry’s latest trends, learn from our experiences through data-driven insights, and support our teammates to thrive, from onboarding to cultivating our company’s next leaders. 

• Learning and Development is an ongoing journey: Effective learning does not start and end with a single training or worksheet. Instead, it’s a continuous assessment of individual, team, and company competencies, and the direction of resources to propel us forward. Thoughtful planning, a growth mindset, and clear and actionable follow-up are all key for making this happen.

• People Leaders play a key role in supporting Learning and Development: Here at RapidSOS, People Leaders empower their direct reports to achieve their individual, team, and company goals. Learning and Development is central to this, from helping a teammate articulate development opportunities, to creating a culture of psychological safety, to supporting team collaboration and knowledge sharing. 

To turn these beliefs into reality, we focus on three things:

• Providing targeted resources to support growth: We offer resources tailored to our needs, such as trainings on Project Management and Data Visualization, templates for effective 1:1 conversations and project debriefs, and support for outlining Learning & Development plans for individuals and teams alike. We frequently measure the impact of our offerings to ensure the content is valuable.

• Creating the time for learning: We embed learning in team and company meetings through deep-dives on key topics and time for team members to share their own learnings, create guides and templates to promote and accelerate on-the-job learning, and provide space to “Drop Everything And Learn,” or D.E.A.L. (including our First Annual Day of Learning – see below for more details!).
• Cultivating a culture of continuous learning: The most important part of Learning and Development at RapidSOS is that it’s embedded in our culture. We encourage the team to learn from one another through Lunch & Learns and peer-to- peer development conversations, recognize wins through monthly learning awards, and equip People Leaders with tools to promote learning on their teams.

This week we at RapidSOS are hosting our first-annual company-wide Day of Learning. The Day of Learning is an exciting opportunity for us to embody our commitment to a culture of learning, develop skills identified as critical for growth, and identify and execute on our learning goals. The day will be cleared of meetings and filled with sessions such as 2021 Year in Review Deep Dive, Workshops on Communication and Data Visualization, a panel with our team members who’ve themselves worked on the front lines of emergency response, independent learning time, networking, and much more. We look forward to sharing learnings and best practices from this special day to benefit our partners and peers.

Day in and day out, our company-wide focus on Learning and Development inspires reflection and growth, enabling us to achieve our mission and live out our values.

Stay tuned to see what’s “growing” at RapidSOS – #GrowWithRapidSOS.

Interested in joining a company that values learning as a driver for transforming emergency response? Check out our open roles today.  

Want to learn with us? Attend one of our upcoming webinars as we chat with industry leaders about how providing life-saving data to 911 is transforming public safety!