Employee Spotlight — Karen Fermo
Welcome to our first Employee Spotlight! In this week’s addition we speak with Karen Fermo our Senior Design Ops Specialist based in Melbourne. Karen talks to us about her role in the Design team at SEEK, and in particular, her focus on building our team learning and development programme.
Tell us about your role?
Hey, I’m Karen and I’m a Senior Design Ops Specialist based in Melbourne. At the heart of what I do is enabling our design team which includes designers, researchers and discipline specialists, to do their best work and to elevate the impact of design across the business. Our work in Design Ops is broad and I am currently working on a few exciting things including optimising our tools, culture and wellbeing, learning and development, and setting up a metrics framework.
What is the approach to learning and development?
Our approach to Learning & Development in the team is about fostering a culture of curiosity and continuous growth. We invest in both personal development with dedicated funds and time to support individual goals as well as Team Development which targets key strategic capabilities for the design team.
Can you tell us a bit more about the Development programme?
We have released new role definitions for Product Designers and are in the process of releasing updated role definitions for our other functions in the design team to help create clarity around role expectations and to support career pathways.
Our Team Development programme has been set up to help elevate our team’s capabilities and bridge any gaps by leveraging internal knowledge and expertise. We have dedicated L&D time every Friday and our subject matter experts take the team through live, virtual workshops so that our team, based in different regions can learn together. We have also turned our modules into an on-demand resource so the team can pick up learning when needed.
What’s the best part of working in the Design Ops team?
The best part is working alongside lovely people who are as passionate about our team as I am. I really enjoy how dynamic our work is, that we get to work for and with the whole design team, and that there is a lot of collaboration, problem solving and strategic thinking involved.
