Hungary’s role on the Central-Eastern European market remains significant, being home to over 200 service centers with 75,000 employees as of the end of 2020. This means 1,3% of the country’s total employment, and still increasing. The sector has grown by 10% every year, based on the average of the last five years’ data.

Service centers are well known to be a multicultural work environment, but new joiners come from very diverse backgrounds, even that put aside. Career changers, as well as fresh graduates, choose SSCs increasingly often, so experience levels vary greatly too. Hence, getting informed about one’s position, and becoming part of the community, does not happen at the same pace for everyone, either. Onboarding processes can be optimized to facilitate more effective learning, turning diversity in the workplace into an obvious advantage early on.

Several successful onboarding strategies exist. Before remote working gained popularity, entry-level employees were welcomed with a series of in-person events at the office, some of which were educational, and others team building. A downside to this was that the experienced colleagues did not only have to forgo other duties while teaching the new joiners, but often their knowledge was heavily focused on their exact field of expertise. This made it difficult for some new employees to tell specific details apart from the necessary information about the whole of the sector, which increased communication difficulties during collaborations with higher-level colleagues.

Today, when the focus has greatly shifted to online solutions in the workplace, foreshadowed by the already outstanding digital compliance of the sector, onboarding is the next one on the list. Knowledge sharing, an important element of the process, can be executed much more effectively using online platforms because they allow more information to be broadcasted to a wider audience. This demand was met with a new initiation, created by KnowledgePyramid.

The program’s name KeyStone alludes to the stability that an overview of the BSS can offer. And this is exactly what it does, consisting of modules addressing different core topics of the field, each led by a professional with decades of experience. The program is starting in collaboration with the University of Pécs, the Metropolitan University of Budapest being planned as the next partner. Among the teachers we can find Emese Pataki, Ismail Ahmed, Balázs Egri, Krisztina Molnár, Ferenc Sitkei, Timea Varga, and Miklós Manasziev. The courses are taken online, students, graduates, and even entire teams or divisions of companies can apply.

The benefits of outsourced knowledge sharing are not new to leaders of shared service centers: investing in an external program instead of in-house solutions allows for better resource management. Not to mention that work based on the same knowledge and values creates more employee satisfaction. The founder, Monika Slomska has highlighted that they are „not just getting new workforce ready for the future”, the program’s goal is to „help them be the future”.