DeFi Academy — Creating an Internal Training Program that Delivers!

10Clouds is the largest blockchain software development house in Europe - something that we’re all extremely proud of! And while our DeFi dev team has a wealth of sector knowledge and experience under their belts, we wanted to make sure that the rest of the business was up to speed with all the latest news, trends and hot topics in the DeFi world. From HR and operations through to marketing and sales, we wanted everyone to understand the ins and outs of decentralized finance. We believe that this holistic company approach will enable us to go one step further when it comes to delivering stellar service to our clients. So we decided to run an internal training program called The DeFi Academy.

In this blog post, we wanted to tell you a little more about the academy and how we set it up, and to give you some top tips on running your own internal training program.

What exactly is the DeFi Academy?

The DeFi Academy is a training program and repository of resources related to Decentralized Finance.

It was initially created to expand the basic knowledge of blockchain technology among our non-delivery teams. That’s why we released a short series. We started by explaining the simplest issues such as:

• What is Blockchain and how does it work?
• How does a Smart contract work?
• What is the Consensus algorithm?

Just to be sure that everyone is on the same level of knowledge. In the following stages we moved to tougher topics, such as:

• What is an NFT? How does it differ from a coin?
• What is DAO?
• What is Web 3.0?

We also wanted our community to be involved in the Defi Academy, so we launched the company's knowledge repository, where anyone is welcome to join and leave some useful links.

The other way we engaged the audience was by delivering short 30-minutes blocks of knowledge and exercises across non-delivery teams.

We know how important it is to have some fun while learning so we used popular platforms to explain how one can build their own token.

We had fun but we’ve also learned about the progress of a crypto journey.

The project will now continue into its next phase. It started from subject foundations, progressed to expert talks, and now it will focus on more advanced topics.

What makes an internal training program successful? Our top tips

1. Set yourself a clear goal

It might sound obvious, but you won’t create a successful training program, without setting yourself clear goals and objectives. In our case, our primary goal was that: ‘All our non-delivery team members’ had a solid understanding of the basics of DeFi. We also conducted an internal analysis of the existing level of subject knowledge in these teams so that we know that we were pitching our materials at the right level. Naturally, there were some people who had a greater knowledge than others. That’s why we decided that we would begin from the basics and then offer a greater level of depth. That way, we could allow employees to choose which elements of the program were best suited to them (and to omit the ones that already covered information and knowledge that they knew).

2. Pitch your training program to your employees’ learning style

Adults have a different approach to learning than children, so it’s important to make sure that you create a program that engages and enthuses them. You should aim to align each element of your program with a specific learning objective as well as their own personal development goals.

As your employees will all have their own individual life and work experience, it might be useful to contextualize your learning.

For example, during the DeFi Academy, we encouraged participants who had previously invested in crypto to share their experiences and to delve deeper into how particular elements of their journey as customers worked behind the scenes

3. Choose a format that engages learners

We’ve all been there. We’ve sat through powerpoint presentations of 70 slides as a trainer ineffectually tries his or her very best to engage the audience for a prolonged period of time. But we’re in 2022, and there are many innovative methods of training delivery which can help learners to better absorb the information that you’re sharing with them. In the DeFi Academy, we experimented with different formats, including presentations, videos, podcasts and written explanations of key terms.

While some of the training was delivered live, we also wanted to give our employees the opportunity to go back to the materials at a later stage, which is why we stored them all as easily accessible links on our intranet.

What is the future of DeFi Academy?

We’ve already delivered six core elements of the DeFi Academy series, but we’re just getting started. To truly embed subject knowledge across teams, we know that we need to regularly check in on the progress of our training. That’s why we’re planning to conduct a survey to check in with our participants on how useful they’ve found the course so far, what they feel is missing, and what materials they would find useful in Series 2. We will aim to further develop the program following their tips. This is important to us because we want them to be engaged learners, and a great way of doing this is by engaging them in the curation of the content!