The Best Learning Initiative We Did? We Let the Experts Teach Themselves.

Sze Foong has a straightforward way of explaining what she does. She helps people do their jobs better, either technically or in communicating. That is it. No elaborate framework. No strategic positioning statement. Just a clear-eyed focus on what actually makes a difference to real people doing real work.

It is a sensibility shaped by an unusual path. Before fintech, before Shopee, before Kredivo Group, where she leads Talent Development across 1,300 people across Southeast Asia, she was an English teacher. Then, a teacher trainer. Working with adults in Bangkok, Budapest, Hanoi, New York, and Singapore for more than a decade. When she eventually moved into corporate L&D, she arrived without the inherited assumptions most practitioners carry in.

That has turned out to matter.

The LMS They Chose Not to Have

The most telling illustration of how Sze Foong thinks came at around the 600-person mark, when Kredivo faced the question most scaling companies face: Do we get an LMS?

They said no. And have kept saying no ever since, now at more than twice that headcount.

It is not ideological. It is pragmatic. In a company growing as fast as Kredivo, the most meaningful learning is already happening in the daily work: new features, new markets, new iterations. People are engaged with that learning because it is immediately relevant to what they are doing. A formal platform, in that environment, risks becoming an expensive layer of administration on top of learning that is already occurring more naturally.

“A lot of LMSs are glorified platforms that look good,” she says. “You spend a lot of time building them and rolling them out, and then the number of people actually on them for personalised learning is not what the pitch promised.”

Her alternative is direct partnership: deploying her team to the specific divisions with the biggest needs and helping them with their actual deliverables, from SQL to Java to talking to customers more effectively.

“The learning that has really driven impact is learning partnerships. Deploying my team to specific divisions with the biggest needs and helping them with their actual deliverables. That has got far more results than any platform.”

Letting the Experts Teach

Sze Foong’s proudest initiative of recent years was not something her team built and delivered. It was something they stepped back from.

When it came time to run their annual learning festival with AI as the focus, the obvious move was to bring in external experts, run company-wide sessions, and deliver a polished programme. They chose a different direction entirely.

Instead, her team found people inside the company who were already using AI tools in their everyday work, and got them to share what they had learned with their own teams. Not generic AI sessions. Context-specific demonstrations from colleagues doing the same job, showing exactly how they were using the tools to work faster.

“People then saw: this isn’t just let’s play with Claude or whatever,” she says. “This is something I can actually use to help me do my work faster.”

The adoption was quicker than anything an external presenter could have produced. And the presenters themselves got something valuable back: Sze Foong’s team spent time coaching each of them on how to communicate and present more effectively. The learning ran in both directions.

“The momentum from that initiative has now flipped. We started with people not knowing how to use AI. Now we have so many requests to use it in everyday work that we’re working on governance and policies for who we say yes to.”

Making Data Undeniable

When Sze Foong needs to move a senior stakeholder, she lets the data do it for her. Specifically, the data from new hire surveys collected at the end of probation have produced a consistent stream of candid feedback about what the onboarding experience does well and where it falls short.

The approach is simple: gather enough responses saying the same thing, and the pattern becomes impossible to dismiss. She recently sat with the SVP of Engineering and showed him the two areas most new hire engineers consistently flagged as needing improvement. In a company as data-obsessed as Kredivo, that conversation required very little persuasion.

“When you have a chorus of people saying very similar things, you gather all that data together, sit somebody down, and say: look at this, it’s undeniable,” she says. “What can we do about it?”

The Escape Room and the Mindset Shift

Sze Foong describes herself as naturally risk-averse. A previous manager changed that, encouraging her to take bigger swings in pursuit of bigger results.

The current big swing is an escape room, being built in newly acquired office space in Indonesia, designed to compress the extended onboarding journey into a two-day immersive experience that communicates company culture through doing rather than telling. It is still in progress. The results are not yet in. But the willingness to try it reflects a shift in how she thinks about L&D.

“The company culture is forgiving of failure up to a certain point,” she says. “And a yes-more-than-no mindset is a genuinely different way of thinking about what learning and development can be.”

The Warning She Is Already Watching For

Sze Foong’s concern about where the profession is heading is specific and personal. She is watching junior employees use AI to produce reports where the heading does not match the content, proposals that are polished but hollow, and work that has skipped the struggle that builds actual judgment.

“You need to go through some hard times of doing shitty emails and shitty slides and getting scolded for it,” she says. “That’s how the learning happens. AI is removing that from juniors. And I think we are not paying enough attention to what they’re losing.”

She is currently working with her company’s head of AI transformation on sessions that address exactly this: not just how to use AI, but what you give up when you hand too much over to it. Which tasks benefit from AI assistance, which capabilities atrophy when you stop doing them yourself, and how to stay sharp in a world where the tool is always faster.

For Sze Foong, that is the real L&D challenge of the next five years. Not keeping up with AI. Staying honest about what it costs.

Sze Foong is one of Asia’s featured voices in the aTalent × Docebo Trailblazer Campaign — spotlighting the region’s most influential L&D leaders. Learn more at trailblazer.atalent.com