Daniel Asplund … on lifelong learning

He is the curious teacher who saddled up and bet on a new exciting challenge. Daniel Asplund develops Alligo’s investment in learning.

Curious. The word keeps coming up when Daniel Asplund describes himself. Curious about understanding people, events and needs, about business systems and learning. Curious about how best to lay a floor and move a wall.

“I live in an old house so, yes, there is a lot to do. For me it is all about “learning by doing” and I think it’s really fun. I usually buy a bag of loose screws from our store here in Tyresö when I go home for the weekend, as a little Friday treat,” he says and laughs.

Daniel Asplund began his professional career as a freelance photographer, but changed track after ten years and applied for teacher training. Four years later, he graduated as a qualified teacher in Swedish, English, maths and the social sciences. After that, he waited a few years as a middle school teacher before his curious eyes caught sight of a job advertisement in which Alligo was looking for a person for a new position within the company’s training initiative. He applied and got the job.

He has worked at Alligo now since March 2023. According to his business card his position is Nordic Learning & Development Specialist, is a part of Alligo’s investment in learning. He describes his position and workplace as a perfect combination of everything she looks for in a professional life. Here he has a permanent job and the colleagues he missed as a freelancer, while he is freer to plan his working day now than in the scheduled school world.

“It’s simply great fun. And it’s exciting to be involved in creating a service that didn’t exist before,” he says.

What does a training specialist actually do at work? Daniel talks at length and is engaged in developing and adapting training courses according to existing needs, filling them with relevant content, anchoring them internally in the organisation as well as following up and measuring the results of the various training courses. Right now, this could for example be about creating content for Alligo’s LMS system (Learning Management System), or planning sales training courses in two different countries. To help him, Daniel has a training council with people with knowledge from various departments within the company.

“In the council, we discuss what training courses are needed and what priorities should be made within the various departments. Before training courses are planned, it is important to have the target group in mind in order to understand how best to create conditions for learning. This could, for example, involve adapting material according to how the target group best absorbs information.

Cooperation is important to Daniel. And building relationships. As a teacher, he therefore liked to hang out with his students during breaks to show that they could have fun together. In this way, he became a leader they wanted to listen to – well, maybe not always, but more often than if he had been that schoolmaster whom the students only saw in front of the lectern. He is convinced of that. He has the same philosophy in his role at Alligo. He wants to meet people and is therefore out in the organisation as much as he can.

“I want to create social capital here as well. There are always critics, but you have to make friends with them. Everything becomes easier when you have fun together,” he says.