Training employees across three time zones: inside Galileo Learning's curriculum development
Every summer, tens of thousands of campers converge on Galileo Learning's 85 camps.

Across San Francisco Bay, Southern California, and Chicagoland, campers of all ages can pick from themes such “Expedition to Everest” or “Deep Ocean Explorers,” where they might explore the science of scaling mountains, how to make blizzard shelters and rescue robots, craft art depicting deep sea ocean dwellers, or engineer exploration vessels inspired by octopus tentacles. Galileo Learning takes traditional camp activities like arts and crafts or outdoor adventure, and applies a method called the Galileo Innovation Approach, which is designed to nurture innovative potential in each camper.
Facilitating these camps takes upward of 2,500 staffers who work throughout the summer, as well as extensive planning and training by the Galileo Learning team in the months leading up to camp. It's a huge undertaking–for many of the staff members, it might be their first time working at the camp or even their first job ever. For camp directors and managers, there's a running list of rolling deadlines throughout the year: hiring, training, running the camp, shutting down, and everything in between.

Tapping into subject matter experts
Tom Bowen works as Galileo Learning's Director of Learning and Development, as well as its Director of Technology, so his day-to-day entails not only training the new camp staffers but also developing the strategy, implementation, and support of their internal tools. Because the camps are distributed, their staffers themselves are spread across the country, making it hard to do large, in-person trainings. So the team employs a blended model: a comprehensive online training experience paired with dedicated onsite training days before camp opens.
“That way they get the chance to learn all about how to do their work prior to showing up, but when they show up they get to actually practice applying what they've learned before the first day of camp,” Bowen explained. “It was previously all in-person training, but once we expanded to multiple regions that wasn't scalable for us. We had to convert all of the in person training into online training. And Airtable really helped us refine our workflows so that we could collaborate with all our subject matter experts efficiently.”
Airtable is one of their most central productivity tools. They call it their “one-stop-shop for almost everything.” This includes collaborating with all of the individuals responsible for programming–whether that be the camp curriculum teams, field ops, or people ops. They work together to design the trainings, figuring out what the best format is.
Airtable really helped us refine our workflows so that we could collaborate with all our subject matter experts efficiently.