A structured program that connects development needs to in-house know-how, without overloading HR
From development need to on-the-job experience: growing people with the know-how your company already has
base 9’s Peer Learning is designed to turn the experience of your most expert colleagues into a company-wide advantage. In organizations, every HR and L&D function recognizes three dynamics:
- technical skills become obsolete faster than they can be trained
- critical know-how sits in the heads of a few people
- every exit, retirement or reorganization takes years of experience out of the company overnight.
The question is no longer whether to invest in skills transfer, but how to do it in a structured way.
Today the most common answer is training, supported by informal mentoring or hand-overs handled case by case. Training remains an important lever, but learning and development take shape in the professional context: social learning theory (Bandura) and research on situated learning show how much people learn by observing and working with those who already know how. Informal initiatives, however, depend on individual goodwill and are not always tracked.
And when these initiatives extend to many people, they become administrative work for HR: requests, matching, confirmations, refusals, reminders, reports. A development need is easy to write down; what is harder is connecting it, simply and repeatably, to the experience the company already has.
base 9’s program makes it possible to capitalize on on-the-job learning processes, even starting from your existing Performance Management process, with no redesign and no need to map all of the organization’s knowledge upfront.
In our Peer Learning projects, which we tailor to each organization, the employee and their manager identify the knowledge and behaviors to develop first, and can choose the best lever among three paths:
- Technical Shadowing: transfer of technical skills, processes and know-how through direct observation of, and exchange with, an expert colleague.
- Role Modeling: observing and exploring different working and leadership styles, to broaden one’s repertoire of managerial behaviors and prepare for responsibilities in complex contexts.
- Peer Coaching: structured exchange between properly trained peers on real problems experienced in different areas, to build self-awareness and new behavioral skills.
Content and goals are defined by the employee and their manager, so the work focuses on function and business priorities and makes both accountable for continuous improvement.
How the journey works
- Kick-off: a launch meeting on the value of observation and know-how transfer.
- Learning Guide & Training: training sessions and guides tailored to each role involved.
- One-to-one meetings: about six meetings between the person in development and the Expert, over 4-6 months.
- Follow-up: periodic communications and tools to monitor progress.
A platform to run the program at scale
The useful part stays human; the repetitive part does not. The base 9 platform manages requests, matching, communications, replies, alternatives and reminders, while an AI assistant answers the simpler questions from participants and program contacts.
HR gets dashboards and reporting split by population, real-time monitoring, data export and automated onboarding: no parallel Excel files, email ping-pong or manual extractions to see where things stand. With the platform, thousands of emails can become almost zero, and the program can grow from 100 to 1,000 people without increasing HR’s workload.
HR stays in charge: it positions the initiative, engages the business, checks the initial inputs, handles exceptions and reads the results. Repetitive tasks move to the system: notifications, status updates, monitoring and data feeds.
A model already proven at scale
The model has already been implemented and run successfully. At one of Italy’s leading insurance groups, we helped the L&D team extend Peer Learning to the entire population, making the program operational within weeks and significantly reducing organizational cost and effort:
- 1,000+ people involved in one year
- 400 Experts engaged
- 90% program participation
- 70% of participants started within 7 days
- 3,000+ operational emails automated
The program grew over time from technical shadowing alone to role modeling, in direct response to participants’ requests.
For HR leaders, Peer Learning is a strategic tool to safeguard critical know-how, speed up on-the-job development and build networks across silos, with concrete evidence of what happens in the field.
To get started you don’t need to reinvent your L&D processes: you need to connect well what is already there. Together we define the population, rules and configuration, to build a concrete proposal for your company.