Today we are launching an exciting project. The Sunlight 30 is a series of playlists curated by world experts covering different business functions.

Whether you are looking for Project Management, Design, Marketing or Operations guidance, you can access these playlists directly from the homepage of the Sunlight platform and learn more through our landing page.

‍A solution to “microlearning” for startups

This project was born out of a key pain point we kept hearing from customers: lots of early-stage companies and startups are committed to building a strong culture in their teams, and most have some learning budgets for their employees to go to conferences, buy books, etc. These companies, however, are far from being able to afford a full L&D program from existing providers, and the current solutions for companies simply can't satisfy their needs as their budgets are limited.

We've seen this pattern time and time again, and we've committed to helping startups empower their teams through "microlearning", the small budgets for employee growth that early-stage companies can actually afford.

How does the Sunlight 30 fit into this?

The Sunlight 30 seeks to expose teams of all sizes, budgets and regions to the expertise of world leaders through our learning playlists, and there are three key ways in which we want to leverage this amazing resources for teams:

A) Don't just buy conference tickets. Tie your $ to pathways!

A lot of the spending that happens in companies is completely isolated from other resources and learning: you may use your $1000 yearly allowance on some conference tickets and a few books, but this is of little educational value by itself.

Research consistently shows that people learn better when the content they are learning is contextualized within a larger pathway that has future steps and an end goal to the employee learning.

Sunlight playlists are the easiest way to create these learning pathways: if you want your junior engineers to develop into fully competent senior engineers and team leaders, you can create a playlist that contextualizes their developer conference tickets with other resources that will grow their learning exponentially, such as books, podcasts, or online courses.

 Now imagine if those pathways were curated by world leaders, your employees can now access decades of experience from leaders at the click of a button, and you can then tie your budget to real learning outcomes.

B) Inspire anyone to make playlists

Playlists are really easy to make, share and collaborate on. 

Whether you are an employee wanting to carve your own career or skill path, a manager looking to share your knowledge with your team, or a Heads of People looking to train your company, playlists are a very useful tool for anyone to have.

The Sunlight 30 serves as a reference for anyone to make playlists about the skills they want to learn about or share with others!

C) Empower managers to grow their teams

When doing performance reviews and having check-ins with your team, we keep hearing the same story from managers: they feel they want to share resources and opportunities with the employees that are still learning their craft, and they have no better option than putting together a Google Doc with links for the team to check. But this solution really doesn't solve anyone's problems - the manager gets no followup on which resources actually were utilized, and the employee gets little contextual information as to why those resources are relevant, or where to go after they've completed all links.

The Sunlight 30 is a perfect complement for regular playlist, which can be edited by any manager to include these links in a much better structure and format.

As we continue supporting small businesses in their push to grow their teams, the Sunlight 30 represents a new way for companies to build a "plug-and-play" learning culture by accessing learning plans and pathways way before they can start their own L&D department. Because the world doesn't need any more wasted "micro-learning"!