No training, no progress

“O ti formi o ti fermi” (No training, no progress) is a play on words devised by the Formaper training organization that is often used by our Founder & CEO Laura Gori because it perfectly expresses Way2Global’s drive for continuous improvement.

Training activities play a central role at our translation agency. On the one hand, they enable us to provide cutting-edge translation services; on the other, they help us make a positive impact on the surrounding community, with a particular focus on women and young people.

At Way2Global, training has no limits, but is targeted at all stakeholders: from top management to employees, suppliers and external contractors, spanning all generations.

Continuous training: our focus

Continuous training is a key focus area at Way2Global, and we are always looking for new training courses to integrate into our Lifelong Learning programmes designed to foster the professional growth of our workforce. Recent examples include the advanced training course attended by our CEO to qualify as Chief Value Officer and draft our Integrated Balance Sheet.

Training is by no means limited to top management, but concerns all employees, each of whom is involved in training activities tailored to their needs and interests.

This year in particular, we are following a high-level training course called SmartNetworking aimed at developing soft skills to apply smart working in the most appropriate and functional manner.

The weekly AMA (Ask Me Anything) meetings are bottom-up initiatives that arose from a need to increase on-the-job training for new hires entering the company. In 2021, we managed to hire 7 new staff in spite of the challenges posed by the ongoing pandemic, while also increasing the proportion of total hours devoted to training to 7%.

Our training activities go beyond the scope of the company and are also aimed at contractors, i.e. translators and proofreaders, whom we consider an integral part of our community. They are also included in the training programmes that we are committed to supporting so that they keep up to date in their respective fields of specialization (e.g. financial, life sciences, technical, etc.), as well as in digital skills.

Few other sectors have been revolutionized by the advent of digitization to the same extent as the language industry. Linguists’ work tools are cutting-edge technologies that require constant training. However, not everyone has access to such opportunities, especially in the wake of the pandemic, which worsened conditions for those women and young people, who are permanently excluded from the labour market due to the digital mismatch.

At Way2Global, we decided to respond to this imbalance in the labour market with the creation of Way2Academy, our most recent company project. We have made this Open Education platform available to anyone who wants to train with our in-house courses. The platform grows and expands with new sessions based on training needs reported by users.

Training of new generations

As advocates of a more sustainable economic system, we never miss opportunities to participate in initiatives to educate the younger generation. In recent months, for example, we have had the pleasure of taking part in two significant projects.

The first is the project launched by the aforementioned Formaper, a training organization run by the Milan Monza Lodi Chamber of Commerce, called “Young people and the labour market”. The initiative, which we have participated in for the second year, educates young people on how to apply for jobs and how to approach a job interview, while enabling companies to focus recruitment on the younger generation.

The project is conducted digitally: The young people make video presentations that are provided to the companies, which assess these presentations and choose, based on internal needs, which candidates to interview.

The second project is B Corp School, a B Corp environmental sustainability and entrepreneurship training programme recognized by MIUR as a PCTO (Courses for Cross-Disciplinary Skills and Orientation), designed and implemented by our fellow B Corp Invento Lab. This initiative gives students an opportunity to create real start-ups inspired by the B Corp model. At the end of the project, the start-ups participate in the Changemaker Competition, presenting their work with a pitch to a jury composed of entrepreneurs from B Corp companies, who judge each project and award the finalists. This valuable initiative not only connects schools with the labour market, but also helps to spread the values of B Corp culture among the younger generation.

On each occasion, it is an immense pleasure for all of us at Way2Global to take part in these initiatives.

Supporting the entry of new generations into the labour market and showing them that a more sustainable model of doing business already exists is a source of enormous satisfaction for us.