Ali Siddiq, CEO & Co-founder, Amal Academy

I'm Ali Siddiq. I'm the CEO and Co-founder of a nonprofit for impact education venture in Pakistan called Amal Academy.

Our vision is to build towards a society where everyone is reaching their full potential, and where our starting point has been a three-month career preparation fellowship that is focused on helping students from underserved backgrounds develop the right kind of skill sets, values, and mindsets to be successful in professional life.

Our vision is a society where everyone reaches their full potential, and that's definitely true for the fellows, but it's also true for our team as well. I think it's an ongoing journey.

One thing that we do is that about 40% of our team is actually graduates of Amal Academy, the fellowship program itself. That gives us a head start. That definitely helps, but what we're looking to do is help people become lifelong learners, critical thinkers, self-starters, problem-solvers.

If you come and work at Amal Academy, then you can expect to be pushed out of your comfort zone. We have weekly Lunch & Learn sessions with the team where a team member gets up and talks about something they're passionate about, something they've learned. We sometimes invite external guests and entrepreneurs from our network into the organization as well.

Every week we have a team meeting, and we start off with two parts: One is 'Reflections and Aha's'; anything within work or beyond work, and anybody's welcome to share that. The second thing is 'Encourage the heart'; if somebody's gone above and beyond for you to help you out, just encourage their heart and do it publicly. Those kinds of things.

Then the third thing, I think, is providing our team opportunities for professional development and personal development as well. For example, we have courses from Acumen Academy available for the team, and we workshop them and do a two-day workshop around different elements of those courses. Other learning resources as well.

We also have an open policy. If you want to learn something, if there's something you're passionate about, if you think there's something you need for your professional advancement, whether we want to stay at Amal Academy or for your next step in your career, let us know. We'll figure out a way to either build that in-house or we'll figure out how we can fund that for you to go and take that course somewhere else.

Key takeaways 

• Foster a culture of continuous learning for individuals to grow

• Create space for team members to share their passions and learnings

• Offer resources for team members to pursue their learning needs and career aspirations