Highlights
- Continuous learning at Inflexion helps employees build technical and interpersonal skills throughout their careers, with development tailored to their role, experience and responsibilities.
- Applying new skills to live deals, portfolio companies and day-to-day work turns formal learning into practical experience that can improve future decision-making.
- Sharing lessons across teams turns individual experience into institutional knowledge, allowing Inflexion’s 27 years of accumulated expertise – alongside fresh perspectives – to benefit the wider firm.
Sharing knowledge across teams helps Inflexion turn its experience into better decisions. This 2nd part of a 3-part series looks at ensuring new perspectives continue to flow through the firm.
As Inflexion has grown, both internationally and in the UK, so has the collective experience within the firm. Ensuring that knowledge can be accessed and shared means lessons learned in one team, transaction or portfolio company can benefit colleagues elsewhere. A virtuous cycle of learn, apply, share helps people build skills, test them through practical experience and then bring what they have learned back to colleagues.
Inflexion’s L&D programme highlights the importance placed on internal expertise sharing as it helps turn experience from transactions, portfolio work and specialist functions into institutional knowledge. And this learning travels in multiple directions: senior employees pass on experience, specialist functions broaden investment-team knowledge, and more junior colleagues can introduce new tools or perspectives.
This knowledge becomes more valuable when it is shared, so at Inflexion, development combines formal training with learning from colleagues and practical experience.
“We’ve grown significantly over the last 27 years, so we have a huge amount of knowledge within the firm,” explains Kirsty Tikerpae, Inflexion Partner. “The opportunity is to bring more of it to the forefront of our decision-making.”
Learn: building skills and perspectives
Learning continues throughout a career at Inflexion, with development tailored to role, experience and changing responsibilities.
For the investment team, this ranges from technical sessions covering areas such as buyout and structuring fundamentals, M&A and public-to-private transactions to external training in negotiation and communication. Programmes including VCP Launchpad and Inflexion Insights broaden understanding of how different teams contribute to investing and value creation.
Specialist functions also have tailored programmes across areas including finance, legal, tax and talent, while cross-functional sessions allow their expertise to reach the wider firm.
Internal knowledge shares and hackathons have allowed colleagues experimenting with emerging tools such as AI to share their experience with the wider firm, helping others understand how the technology can be applied to their own work.
Apply: turning learning into experience
New technical knowledge can inform a live transaction; negotiation skills can be tested in a deal environment; and insights from the value acceleration team can help investment professionals think differently about a portfolio company's growth plan
This creates a continuous link between learning and the day-to-day work of the firm whereby experience gained through investments, exits and portfolio value creation creates new knowledge that can inform future decisions.
Technology is increasingly helping Inflexion make its accumulated experience more accessible. “AI truly is a game changer in helping us make the most of our 27 years’ experience – whether that is deal knowledge, previous investment committee papers and decisions to experience of sectors and international expansion,” Kirsty says. “The knowledge no longer needs to sit within a certain region or function; we can surface it and make it accessible.”
She points out that AI is not about replacing human judgement but about giving people better access to the firm's collective experience.
Share: turning experience into institutional knowledge
Bringing those experiences back into the firm is the final part of the cycle. “People are generous with their time and knowledge because they’ve learned from others previously and know the value and overall benefit of it,” Kirsty says. “It’s a pay-it-forward mentality ingrained in our culture.”
Investment and exit case studies, teach-ins and peer-to-peer sessions give colleagues the opportunity to share what they have learned – including occasions where outcomes differed from expectations. Specialist teams similarly share developments from their fields, helping knowledge travel across functions rather than remaining within individual teams.
As Inflexion continues to grow, maintaining the exchange of experience becomes increasingly important. “Sharing expertise helps preserve Inflexion's culture as the firm grows. Continuous development makes both individuals and the firm stronger; and combining this accumulated experience with fresh thinking benefits everyone,” says Andrew Neville, Partner at Inflexion.
Learning, applying, sharing
Martin Voelker, Assistant Director within Investment team (joined 2024)
What I’ve learned
Every time you work on a new potential investment, you interact with the whole of Inflexion’s ecosystem, from experienced investment partners to our legal team, specialist functions and trusted advisors. One of the areas I’ve learned the most about is minority dealmaking which we do through Partnership Capital, our dedicated minority investing fund. The resources we have available, and the other experienced investors in the team, have helped me understand what motivations lie behind the legal jargon of shareholder agreements, and what is and what isn’t important in conversations with founders, vendors, managers and with internal stakeholders.
What I’ve applied
The biggest benefit of understanding shareholder rights, agreements and negotiations is that it helps put meaning behind the analytical work we do and drive deeper conversations. It’s easier to get to the heart of a potential partnership when you’re comfortable that you know what your counterparty is after, and that you may have a solution for them.
Hannah Berdal, Senior Legal Counsel (joined 2022)
What I’ve learned
As part of the legal team, I spend a large proportion of time working with colleagues across the business. These experiences have helped me become much more pragmatic when problem solving, and I always pick up a new perspective or approach when working with peers in different teams. I am a big believer that wide-ranging experience leads to more adaptive, creative decision making and I think Inflexion’s cross-team culture really fosters that.
What I’ve shared
We spent a considerable amount of time in 2026 building AI capabilities to process our legal precedent data and decisions. We then realised that other teams could use similar functionality in their own departments, which we’re working to roll out. We also have frequent cross-team teach-ins on various topics to make sure we’re sharing our knowledge continuously and keeping the dialogue open.
