Learning & development program

Interview with Nicoleta Chirita, Learning & Development Manager

1. What role does continuous learning play in Booking Holdings Romania’s culture?

At Booking Holdings Romania Center of Excellence, continual learning is deeply ingrained in our DNA and stands as one of our core competencies. We are committed to cultivating an environment where everyone is empowered, supported, and equipped to advance in their personal and professional development journey.

The learning culture empowers our colleagues and teams to rapidly upskill and reskill, embrace experimentation, and respond with agility to change. It’s a win-win, as it keeps the company resilient and future-ready and our colleagues motivated and driven to develop and thrive.

2. What steps do you take to create a culture of continuous learning across the Booking Holdings Romania?

At Booking Holdings Romania, we are deeply committed to building a culture of continuous learning and high performance. We've developed a robust Leadership Model - the Centered Leader - with 9 core competencies to guide and embed the behaviors we expect from our managers, ensuring leadership is consistent, impactful, and future-ready. To support learning at all levels, we offer comprehensive in-house academies tailored both for employees and managers, alongside targeted functional and technical development programs.

We actively invest in team interventions designed to strengthen collaboration and drive high-performing teams, while our growing communities of practice foster knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer learning across the organization

We’ve also backed our learning vision with meaningful support: each employee receives an annual Learning Wallet budget, and is guided by their managers in creating Personal Development Plans as an integral part of the performance process.

To enhance visibility and accessibility, we’ve also invested in making learning more user-friendly and digital-first. We launched a Learning Bot that gave employees visibility into their learning wallet budget and we’re excited to launch a fully internally developed Learning App, giving employees a one stop shop to request learning opportunities, track their learning history and budget spent, this year.

3. How do you tailor your learning strategy to meet the needs of different employee groups (e.g., entry-level, managers, leadership)?

Recognizing that each individual has unique learning and development needs, we ensure that every employee can customize their growth path. We have the Learning Wallet Initiative, which grants each employee an annual budget to pursue diverse learning opportunities. This initiative offers flexibility and autonomy, allowing our colleagues to select learning activities that align with their roles, career aspirations, and development plans.

Besides external learning opportunities, we have also developed an in-house learning offer to upskill our colleagues, foster belonging, and create networking opportunities.

DARE Academy: Focused on upskilling employees across various organizational needs.
LEAD Academy: Designed for our people managers, featuring coaching, workshops, and learning journeys tailored to leadership development.
Team Interventions: Custom workshops to enhance team cohesion and effectiveness.
Functional Development Initiatives: Targeted at technical and role-specific skill enhancement.
Online Learning Platforms: Our Learning Management System (LMS) and LinkedIn Learning offer a wealth of resources.
Communities of Practice: Platforms like AI & Friends and Project Management communities encourage peer learning, knowledge sharing and project-based learning, where members engage in real-world tasks and share knowledge to develop skills collectively.
Curated learning content: Monthly curated resources focusing on soft skills & managerial skills development.
Internal Trainers Initiatives: Empowering employees to deliver workshops and share expertise with their colleagues.

4. Can you share any examples of how the learning strategy has positively impacted the Booking Holdings Romania’s employee engagement?

At Booking Holdings Romania, we utilize various indicators to assess the satisfaction and impact of our learning initiatives on employees. The feedback gathered from these surveys underscores the strength of our learning culture and how it resonates with our workforce.

Following the surveys we send out to our employees after our learning initiatives in the company, the results confirm our commitment to fostering a supportive learning environment. Moreover, our colleagues feel that these initiatives strongly meet the Readiness to Apply Concepts criterion. Additionally, the Net Promoter Score of our learning programs falls into the "excellent" category, highlighting strong recommendations from our participants.

The broader impact of our learning culture is further validated through data from engagement surveys with scores falling into the “excellent” category and ongoing dialogues with employees and managers.

The insights also revealed a strong belief among employees that their colleagues actively seek feedback to learn and grow (people at Booking Holdings COE seek feedback to learn and grow).

5. How do you ensure that learning is aligned with both personal and professional growth?

At Booking Holdings Romania, we view learning as a key enabler for both personal fulfillment and professional advancement. Our approach starts with encouraging each employee to define their own growth path through Personal Development Plans (PDPs). These plans are co-created with the support of managers to ensure they reflect both the individual’s aspirations and the business's evolving needs. To support this dual alignment, we provide a wide array of learning opportunities — from technical certifications to leadership programs and personal effectiveness workshops.

For example, the Managing Self pillar (within the DARE Academy) focuses on cultivating self-leadership, emotional intelligence, resilience, flexibility and many more — empowering individuals to better understand themselves, adapt to change, and manage their emotions.

6. How do you keep the learning strategy flexible to adapt to changing needs and trends?

Our learning strategy at Booking Holdings Romania is intentionally designed to be agile, future-focused, and employee-centered, allowing us to respond quickly to the evolving needs of our people and the business. At the start of the year, we conducted surveys and focus groups across the organization to gather insights and feedback directly from employees and managers.

In addition to these internal insights, we’ve also looked externally for inspiration. We've aligned key elements of our learning strategy with the “Skills of the Future” identified by the World Economic Forum, such as resilience, flexibility, systems thinking, and AI. These capabilities are embedded throughout our DARE Academy, LEAD Academy, and other internal programs to help employees build the skills they need to thrive in a rapidly evolving world.

We ensure adaptability through:

Regular listening loops — including feedback surveys, engagement data, and real-time conversations with teams and managers.
Flexible learning formats — combining live, self-paced, and peer-led experiences.

Digital enablement — including the upcoming launch of our internally built Learning App, designed to make learning management easier.

By staying close to our people, monitoring external trends, and fostering a culture of continuous feedback and experimentation, we ensure our learning strategy stays dynamic, relevant, and impactful.

Learning & development program | Interview with Nicoleta Chirita

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