10 Practices for Building a Learning Organization: Academy
Investing in people’s growth is not just a value. It’s a strategic choice that defines an organization’s ability to face change with awareness and competence.
That’s why Intré, as part of its Learning Organization Model practices, created the i3 Academy — or simply the Academy: an internal initiative that offers structured paths for learning and knowledge sharing. A space where the goal is not only to transfer expertise, but also to promote a culture built on dialogue, experimentation, and continuous skill development.
In this article, we’ll explain how our Academy works, what goals it aims to achieve, which topics it covers, and what some of the participants think about the experience.
The 10 Practices of Intré’s Learning Organization
Intré’s Learning Organization model is constantly evolving and focused on skill development and employees’ professional growth. It promotes a collaborative learning environment through targeted practices, encouraging both individual and collective initiative to ensure continuous training and active engagement across the organization.
Intré’s current learning framework is built around ten practices:
- Guilds
- Camp
- Community
- Skill Matrix
- Certifications
- Academy
- CoP “I Wanna Be a Speaker”
- Learning Goals
- Classroom Training
- Language Courses
Let’s now take a closer look at our Academy.
How the Academy Works
Intré’s Academy is built on a practical, personalized approach designed to enhance learning through direct peer-to-peer exchange. Two key roles shape this journey: the mentor, who guides the training path, and the mentee, who chooses to embark on it by selecting from a catalog published on our internal Wiki, where each mentor outlines their own “menu” of topics available for mentoring.
This learning practice is primarily aimed at new employees, but it is always open to those with more experience who wish to challenge themselves as mentees and continue their growth journey.
The program includes weekly one-on-one sessions lasting 1–1.5 hours, spread over a three-month period. At the end of the program, a final retrospective is held to reflect on what has been learned and the objectives achieved.
The Academy can be extended, either maintaining the same mentor-mentee pair or forming a new one.
To join the initiative, either as a mentor or mentee, simply contact your Agile Delivery Manager (ADM), who initially acts as a liaison between the two participants. Mentors and mentees do not need to belong to the same daily work team.
Academy Objectives
Our Academy was created to support the growth of individuals through targeted and personalized learning paths.
The first objective is to ensure an effective, tailored onboarding for new colleagues. This is not a standardized, one-size-fits-all program. Each path is designed together with a mentor, taking into account the skills required for the role and the individual’s specific areas for improvement.
A second objective focuses on developing mentorship skills. This ability goes beyond formal training programs and becomes an integral part of team life, helping to strengthen daily collaboration and team dynamics.
Finally, the Academy provides the opportunity to work on skills perceived as weaker, regardless of experience level or seniority. This approach allows everyone to address their areas for improvement in a structured and conscious way.
Topics Covered in an Academy Path
Intré’s Academy is structured around carefully designed learning paths aimed at fostering continuous, targeted technical growth. Each path is developed through a dialogue between mentee and mentor, with the goal of creating a learning plan that addresses the real needs of individuals and project teams.
Among the most frequent areas of focus are the consolidation of design patterns and architectural paradigms (such as SOLID principles, Domain-Driven Design, and functional programming), deepening knowledge of programming languages, frameworks, and tools for Continuous Integration, testing, and containerization.
There are also paths dedicated to Agile methodologies, both from a technical and organizational perspective, with particular attention to eXtreme Programming practices and the key elements of Scrum. Complementing these paths are practical exercises such as coding katas and sessions on transversal topics, including code smells, code refactoring, and software development best practices.
How the Academy is Doing: Feedback from Our People
Our Academy has been active since 2022, and since then several Intré colleagues have stepped up as mentors, while others have participated as mentees. To give some numbers, 15 mentor-mentee programs have taken place, and some are still ongoing.
How is this training initiative going? Is it truly valuable for our people? Let’s hear it from them.
Francesco Sacchi (mentor) – Davide Steri (mentee)
Francesco:
“After several cycles as a mentor within the Academy, this experience felt different. Usually, I support junior colleagues during their first integration into an Intré team, guiding them through an overview of key topics to start on the right foot: frontend or backend basics, REST concepts, Docker, development best practices, and agile methodologies.
With Davide, however, the starting point was different. He already had solid knowledge on several topics and brought more specific needs, such as deepening his understanding of MongoDB in preparation for a certification, as well as curiosity about broader, cross-cutting topics like design patterns or clean code, areas where he still had some uncertainties.
Even in this less structured context, a flexible approach proved to be successful. Together, session by session, we built a tailored path that integrated naturally with his daily team work and supported his technical and professional growth.“
Davide:
“I found the Academy experience with Francesco truly valuable and inspiring. It gave me the opportunity to delve into certain technical topics in a focused way while exploring others at a more introductory level, providing an overview that will definitely be useful for my future studies.
The sessions were not just traditional lectures, but open conversations and exchanges of ideas, often linked to real situations encountered in daily work. I greatly appreciated the flexibility of the program. There was no rigid structure to follow, allowing space to adapt the topics each time according to current interests.”
Mosé Raguzzini (mentor) – Giulia Redolfi (mentee)
Mosé:
My first experience as a mentor within the Academy was a learning journey for me as well. Even in a guiding role, I found myself learning a great deal through a rich and well-structured program, where theory and practice intertwined naturally. Each session struck a dynamic balance between technical content, concrete examples, and informal conversations on cross-cutting topics such as game mechanics, design systems, and personal experiences. Unexpected questions and off-track insights often enriched our discussions, pushing us beyond the planned roadmap.
I had the pleasure of working with a curious and proactive mentee, capable of shifting from a creative approach to a more structured and analytical perspective on game development. Today, she has the tools to observe, design, and, if she chooses, prototype and develop. But most importantly, she has rediscovered—or perhaps discovered for the first time—the passion for a world that is truly worth exploring from the inside.
If there’s a next edition, I will approach it with the same enthusiasm. Because, in the end, I believe I gained more than I gave.
Giulia:
My Academy journey with Mosé, focused on Game Design, was incredibly stimulating. It allowed me to dive deeper into an area that had always intrigued me but that I had never truly had the chance to explore. The sessions were dynamic and well-structured: alongside the theoretical foundations, there was plenty of room for idea exchange and reflections on the gaming world, which Mosé made even more engaging thanks to his passion and expertise. All the topics agreed upon from the start were thoroughly covered, in an environment that encouraged discussion and curiosity. I started from scratch, but by the end of the program, I had built a solid technical foundation and gained new tools to look at the industry from a fresh perspective. An experience I would love to repeat, perhaps exploring other topics: because when knowledge sharing is driven by genuine passion, you learn far more than you ever expect.
Conclusions
Among the ten practices of the Learning Organization model adopted by Intré, the Academy stands out as one of the most tangible expressions of the company’s culture of continuous learning.
It is an opportunity to grow, share knowledge, and build meaningful connections among colleagues, regardless of role or level of experience. Investing time in the Academy means actively contributing to both personal and collective development, strengthening not only technical skills but also the quality of collaboration within teams.