BEING AN EXPLORER AT LINKIT
1.1 HISTORY
LINKIT was founded in 1998 by Bert Peters. Bert started LINKIT from his living room and at the time mainly focused on mediating IT freelancers, with as the first customer, KLM. Over the years, LINKIT has grown from a mediator into an international knowledge-driven IT organization with more than 250 employees.
1.2 PURPOSE & STRATEGY
1. Expand our reach | We will help more organizations bridging the gap in the fastevolving IT world and ensure new technology comes within reach.
“Exploring IT to fit your ambitions. Our purpose is to bridge the gap between fast evolving tech and organizations striving to keep up, making our clients’ ambitions a reality by exploring latest IT developments.”
2. Strengthen our core | we help existing clients make a bigger impact, by uniting our services into one strong core. With the same LINKIT toolbox containing our value propositions.
3. Staying relevant | with dedicated research and development, we diversify our service portfolio to support clients with new innovations. That way we can keep helping them closing the gap, today and tomorrow.
1.3 THE EXPLORER STORY
If you become part of LINKIT, you become an explorer. After all you have indicated, just like all other LINKIT explorers, that you want to start your unique journey and that you feel like discovering! The reason why we call our employees ‘explorers’ is because we see a lot of similarities.
LINKIT explorer [iks’plo:re] noun: ‘a person who explores a new or unfamiliar area. Searches for new information by means of travel’
What does it mean to be an explorer at LINKIT? In any case, as an explorer you want to push your limits, you want to investigate what your next step is with a curious and eager to learn mindset. You have a goal in mind, a final destination, but the journey is all yours. You know you will encounter some bumps along the way and you sometimes have to walk a different path than you initially envisioned. You learn from every journey and in this way you lift yourself (and others) to a higher level every time. We basically summarize this with the following words: Evolve, Excel & Inspire! These are the building blocks of your unique journey at LINKIT.
Evolve: as an explorer, you are aware of and keep up with the latest developments in your field. For this we make sure you have the opportunity to earn certificates and it may be that you visit events. At LINKIT we try to create a setting in which you feel secure leaving your comfort zone and growing as a person.
EVOLVE
INSPIRE EXCEL
Excel: with your knowledge and the right cooperation, you as an explorer are able to innovate in your professional work. By combining your knowledge with your (travel) experience, you come to great results. You know how to work flawlessly with colleagues from LINKIT but also with colleagues from the customer (with a different culture), to create the best result. The time made available by LINKIT for personal development, knowledge sharing and innovation should lead to inspiring results that are of added value for LINKIT, our customers and other interested parties.
Inspire: as an explorer you enjoy sharing your knowledge and inspiring other (possibly future) explorers. For example, by speaking at an event, but of course this can also be done in other ways. Like coaching other colleagues. With your story you trigger other travelers and motivate them to keep discovering, learning and developing!
“It is a pleasure to work for the LINKIT group. Everybody is free to change the company every day for the better, the level of collaboration is high & very friendly, and you can start every day again to explore the best version of yourself.”
- Lando Schebsdat COO LINKITSYSTEMS
“At LINKIT the possibilities are endless, a place to excel and truly be yourself.”
- Lennart Schut Business Consultant
“Development is centerd within the organization! You can develop yourself at LINKIt in a safe environment, where mistakes are seen as lessons and fun as a must.”
- Yasmin Koers UX Designer
Our Hybrid Work policy helps you with this
Because you are an explorer, it is a given that you can do your work at multiple locations. Such as at your customer, our LINKIT (head) office, but also - in consultation with your (customer and) manager or squad lead - from abroad. In this way, as an explorer you are able to combine work and vacation and discover beautiful places in the world (with colleagues). For example, it is possible to give a knowledge session in Cairo together with your colleagues and hang around there for a while. Or to discover Portugal while visiting a knowledge event and work there for one more week while enjoying the last rays of sun. It is also possible to visit our international hubs and work together with other LINKIT explorers (on site) from that location.
1.4 CORE VALUES
Our core values are our compass, as they guide us in making our choices. Our core values are imbedded in our culture and are:
Collaborate
Put the team’s best interests first by showing interest in others, supporting others and speaking up.
Drive
Being passionate and motivated to keep getting better while having fun. In addition keep innovating and delivering great work.
Knowledge
Being curious about new information, absorbing it, sharing it and applying it.
Trust
Taking professional responsibility for your work and being highly loyal to colleagues and the team.
Reliability
Giving others confidence by delivering high quality, honoring agreements and offering suitable solutions (in the long term).
Collaborate
At LINKIT, we don’t just find collaboration important, but it is also one of our core values. We are proud to be a knowledge-driven organization. This means there is an enormous amount of knowledge in-house. This is precisely why we think cooperation is very important. By combining the knowledge, skills and experience within the various teams and disciplines, we ensure a flywheel effect. We reinforce each other. Not only within your own team, but also between the various teams. In addition to allowing our expertise and teams to work together, collaboration is also reflected in how we are organized. Our flat organizational structure requires good cooperation, in which the various business partners optimally support the squads and teams to achieve their goals. This requires proper coordination and communication, so expectations are clear, we work efficiently and everyone within the organization is informed.
Collaboration is also reflected in how we treat each other. Everyone at LINKIT will take the time to help you. Whether it’s an introduction about what someone does within the organization, an opportunity spotted that helped someone else or a question about a deep technical subject. We are there for eachother. People from more than 25 different nationalities work together at LINKIT. We are proud of this, because we believe that knowledge (sharing) and cooperation knows no boundaries. In addition to our head office in Utrecht, we currently have two hubs: one in Germany and one in South Africa.
1998 LINKIT HUB OPENED DÜSSELDORF GERMANY 2019
HUB OPENED PRETORIA SOUTH AFRICA 2022
LINKIT
Collaboration is also high on the list of priorities outside LINKIT. Ultimately we are an IT partner. We work closely with partners and suppliers to serve our existing customers or win new customers. We even work together in a consortium for tenders. By partner we don’t just mean working for the customer, but we work together with the customer and the customer’s employees (think of a product owner, engineers or developers of the customer who are part of a project team).
Drive
Within LINKIT we are driven to keep getting better, for that reason we breathe innovation. we strive to be better every single day. To fully facilitate this, we set up the Innovation Lab at the beginning of 2022. What this means is that LINKIT has reserved time and resources to collect innovative ideas from our explorers and bring them to life. Based on a clear innovation process, we actively search for ideas that will further shape the future of LINKIT. We believe innovation is important to remain relevant as an organization in the rapidly changing IT world and it also enables our explorers to do what they do best: explore! Examples of ideas that have come to life in our Innovation funnel include a planning tool for retail, an IoT blueprint and AI for better alignment between two applications.
We also have a great drive to realize our growth internationally. Since 2019, we have been working on realizing our international ambitions. International growth is one of our strategic pillars and we focus on two areas: growth in low-code business and growth of our knowledge clusters within low-code.
Knowledge
LINKIT is knowledge driven. This means that we invest in knowledge, i.e. our people. After all, it is our people who use their knowledge to help our customers or our internal organization. Our knowledge-driven strategy has three steps:
1 2 3
We focus on a number of expertises: at LINKIT we call these IT expertise teams squads. In addition to the Squads, we also have the Staff Teams and the Business Teams. These teams are the indispensable link to support the Squads in the right way and bring in great projects. We grow these squads and teams with people who are driven to learn and discover. As mentioned earlier, we call these people LINKIT explorers.
We offer people unlimited possibilities to become the best explorer. Think of an unlimited budget for training, study material and visiting knowledge events. But also extensive development paths and the right guidance from your manager and/or mentor. And what about our club days? Up to 10% of your working time to invest in learning, sharing and connecting with your fellow explorers.
We encourage sharing the knowledge we generate with steps one and two. Our explorers share knowledge at our club days, meetups, knowledge events and of course our knowledge platform ITNEXT. By sharing knowledge, we hope to inspire others and to get in touch with potential customers, future colleagues or other interested parties.
Trust & Relaibility
At LINKIT we don’t like to think in boxes. We offer you the tools you need to do your job well, but at the same time give you the space to color inside or outside the lines. You are therefore in the lead of your own growth and determine your own pace, we are happy to give you this confidence. This also means your growth does not have to be limited to growth in seniority, but it is also possible to grow horizontally. For example from Recruitment Business Partner to Account Manager, from Java Developer to CPO, from Customer Service Specialist to Manager Operations or from Trainee to Mendix Developer. We think it is important that you are happy at work and you continue to talk about it.
There is a lot of room and freedom for initiative within LINKIT and therefore a lot is organized by our explorers. This works well, partly thanks to our flat organizational structure and open culture. If you have ideas to make the organization better, we are always open to this. Or if you have ideas to stimulate collaboration and knowledge sharing, we are always up for that. The foundation on which this is based is, as mentioned earlier, is trust. We believe that if we give you the confidence as an explorer to take control of your unique journey, we as an organization can continue to deliver high quality and continue to come up with suitable solutions for our customers. On the other hand, as an explorer you take responsibility for your work and the results. In this way we hope to remain reliable for you as an employer and for our customers as an IT partner. The fact that the last group, our customers, see us as a reliable partner is also evident from the long-term relationships we maintain. What about KLM, our first customer and still one of the largest customers. But customers such as Kyndryl and Wigo4it have also been relying on our services for more than a decade.
CREATE AN UNFORGETTABLE JOURNEY
4.1 A PLACE FOR EVERYONE
We believe it is important to work with people from different cultures, backgrounds and ways of thinking. But it goes further than that, we want to create a working environment in which explorers feel at home, can be themselves, but also really feel that whoever you are, wherever you come from or whatever you believe in, you are always welcome and accepted. We believe that this contributes to innovation and creativity. When people feel comfortable expressing their thoughts, there is room to gain (new) insights and develop innovative solutions. Together we create even more value for our customers and colleagues this way. We therefore consider diversity and inclusion to be an important theme and we are working hard towards a widely supported vision in this area. We are always open to new ideas and/or initiatives related to this theme!
In addition, we believe it is important to guarantee a safe and pleasant working atmosphere and to address each other about behavior that is not in line with this. Of course, we hope that this will not happen, but if necessary, you can always contact the confidential advisers within LINKIT. The confidential adviser can advise, guide and offer you help when you are confronted with undesirable behavior.
4.2 QUARTERLY UPDATES
We are happy to keep you informed of all developments within LINKIT! During our biweekly club days, we take you through all kinds of organizational updates. During our Quarterly Updates, we give you more insight into how we are doing as an organization in relation to our goals, what is going on and what our focus will be in the next quarter. Apart from it being nice to see you there, we also find it important. These updates are for connecting with your colleagues, but also with LINKIT. We think it’s important that you know what’s going on, and we’re happy to share this with you. In addition, our Quarterly Update is not a boring monologue from management, but a true party to attend!
4.3 WELLBEING
At LINKIT we believe that happy and healthy employees get the best out of themselves. To facilitate this for our explorers, we have started our wellbeing platform. This platform has all kinds of activities organized by our wellbeing ambassadors on various wellbeing themes. Participation is certainly not mandatory, but always fun. For example, you can participate in a yoga session, (indoor) skiing, golf or do a cooking workshop together. If you are passionate about something, you can approach a wellbeing ambassador to explore the possibilities of organizing something for LINKIT together.
Mental wellbeing is also important to us. That is why we have confidential advisers that you can approach if you have any concerns. If you do not feel comfortable with one of the confidential advisers from LINKIT, we work together with an organization, PSION. They can be reached by telephone during office hours for any support you might need. If these sessions ask for a follow up, we decide what can help you best together with you.
4.4 ACTIVITIES
At our head office in Utrecht we have a game room to stimulate relaxation and creativity. So you can play pool, throw darts, play table tennis or FIFA between your work activities. We have lunch together, lunch is provided by LINKIT. Around twelve o’clock the crush room is completely filled with all kinds of ingredients for a delicious lunch and we end week with a ‘VrijMiBo’ (Friday afternoon drinks) at our own bar. Where (non-alcoholic) cocktails are made by colleagues every now and then. The office serves as a meeting place for explorers from all over the world! There are also regular team outings where squads are participating in activities or go to an event together. Germany & South Africa are investing in the above as well. There is more than enough to do, but don’t feel obligated to participate in everything.
4.5 CELEBRATE
We love to celebrate at LINKIT! Whether it’s a small present in the mail during Easter, a Christmas package and a Christmas brunch in December or Sinterklaas visiting the LINKIDS. We love a surprise! In addition, we also celebrate the personal milestones of explorers, such as your birthday, a wedding, the birth of a LINKID, an anniversary, and so on. But we also love to celebrate success! Cake for a new partnership, cake for a new customer, and another cake for successful certification for an ISO standard. Or how about the famous Brabant sausage rolls for a first placement or hire of a sales or recruitment colleague? And last but not least, our VrijMiBo is always a celebration before the well deserved weekend starts!
ARE YOU READY FOR TAKE OFF?
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