10 Sept 2024
Anonymous employee
Learn Amp Response
1yThank you firstly for acknowledging that we have a good product and team: we’re very proud of both.
I’m sorry you feel the way you do about your experience with us and about us as a leadership team, not an outcome we ever want and one we will always look to learn from. I acknowledge that we can’t always progress everyone in their career with us, indeed sometimes we have to call time during probationary period when it’s not working as we have in this case.
I also appreciate that there are substantial differences in the working environment in a smaller, growing start-up over that found in larger businesses. Maybe we should have explored this more during the recruitment process to ensure better alignment.
For the record although we are a small business, we are profitable and growing (42% last year). It’s true we aren’t growing as fast as some of our direct competitors but then they have mostly raised venture capital funding and are carrying large losses (burning cash) that fund that faster growth.
There are a lot of learning platforms out there so I imagine for certain customers there will be better option, it all comes down to need. I would say that we have been in lead industry analyst Craig Weiss’s top 3 globally for the last three years so we must be doing something right!
I appreciate good advice, we’re in the learning industry after all. Joe and I do listen but in the end it is our job to make decisions even if others disagree with them. For example, you mention about communicating outside of work hours. We actually have a policy built by the team around this. It recognises that we are responsible for our own downtime, not others. We do use Slack and other platform when we need to, and when we are off it is our responsibility to signal that and mute comms. We reach out to people outside of office hours only by phone message/WhatsApp or by call when it is genuinely unavoidable.
Likewise, we run a process called Explore where we run experiments to test ideas before investing more in them. What we don’t have is the time to research every idea extensively, we’d have failed years ago if we did. We move fast, trying things and switching tack again if needs be. I appreciate this type of work environment isn’t for everyone.
Finally, you know the individual reasons as to why those people left: one left us in the lurch one week in to take a higher paid job he’d continued to interview for after starting with us, and the other two people (who we regret losing) wanted to go and work somewhere entirely different in nature so nothing that we could have done would have affected their decision. Overall, our attrition rates are very low which along with the largely positive reviews on GD I think reflect more accurately the working culture here at Learn Amp. It doesn’t mean we have it all nailed but we do try hard to optimise our employee experience.
Duncan (CEO)