How Apexon Unified Its Culture and Improved Collaboration

Acquisitions are vital to the growth strategy at Apexon, an IT services and consulting firm. In early 2022, the company carried out one of its biggest mergers, melding five distinct companies into a single business.

While the deal allowed Apexon to dramatically expand its offerings, it also created challenges, as any merger does. In particular, Apexon needed a way to unite everyone around a shared set of cultural values — and a shared understanding of what the company does.

“Leaders basically had two asks,” explains Rohin Kumar, Director of Global Talent Development at Apexon. “On the developer side, people were interacting with clients without really understanding how to talk to them. On the consulting side, people coming in from legacy businesses weren’t aware of the entirety of the enterprise. They didn’t know all of our offerings or how our solutions were developed and delivered.”

In short, developers didn’t fully understand the consulting side of the business, and consultants didn’t fully understand the developer side. That meant Apexon was missing out on key opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and effectively address clients’ pain points.

Apexon set out to create an organization-wide learning initiative to help every employee understand the business’s core values and operations. Working with a committee of leaders from across the company and representatives from Skillsoft, Kumar and his talent development team designed Elevate Essentials.

Elevate Essentials is a custom Aspire Journey that blends Skillsoft content and internal Apexon materials to cover two key subjects: Consulting Essentials and Agile Essentials.

“On the client-facing side, we want people to understand how we really push that entire consulting piece and get maximum bang for our buck, so to speak,” says Kumar. “But it’s equally important that we sharpen our skills in terms of how we deliver, and that’s what the agile side is for.”

In the Consulting Essentials segment of the program, employees learn about understanding client needs and Apexon’s unique value propositions. The Agile Essentials segment focuses on Apexon’s agile process for developing IT solutions. Consultants and developers alike take both parts of the program. Upon completion, they earn a custom Digital Badge to recognize their accomplishments.

“Consultants go through Agile Essentials because it’s important for them to understand how we deliver,” Kumar explains. “We also felt developers should go through Consulting Essentials so they could understand how their work reaches the clients.”

While Elevate Essentials was a mandatory assignment for employees, Apexon built buy-in and engagement by getting leaders to act as internal champions.

“Leaders participated in it first, and they found immense value in it,” Kumar says. “That’s how we were able to spread the journey around. Leaders became ambassadors for the program, telling their team members, ‘I myself have done this, and I think it is going to add value for you, too.’”