During the course of a day, our attention is constantly stimulated by various information. We only need to spend 30 minutes on our favourite social network, or turn on our television, to realise the constant hubbub around us. Paradoxically, we have also become more attentive to the type of information we are willing to receive. But the point is that this flood of information is one of the reasons why we want to create the most relevant content possible. But how can we deliver on this promise? We’ll explain it to you in a few lines, so you don’t lose your attention.
A finely tuned catalogue
If you have read our article on the recipe of the Coorpacademy catalogue courses, you will know that we take care of both the presentation and what is on the plate. To engage our learners and stimulate them during their learning, it is important to offer them premium content, designed by educational engineers or in co-publication with exclusive partners such as Forbes, IBM or Cegos. To build a relevant training catalogue adapted to each learner, it is crucial to offer tailor-made content, so that it fits them perfectly. Thus, our content catalogue includes courses concocted by us and also by the business experts of each organisation we work with, to promote the development of each individual’s skills.
Content tailored to the changing world
Learning means progressing, doing better, evolving. This implies not only change, but also temporality. We start from a point A, at a certain point in time, and end up at point B, in some time. Therefore, in a rapidly changing world, learning is essential. In preparing our courses, we think about the world of tomorrow, to better prepare you for it. Thus, the more than 1700 exclusive modules on soft skills that make up our training catalogue are designed to guide you through the 5 crucial transformations for the future of organisations. But fighting for tomorrow’s world means that it still exists. That’s why we offer Coorpecology, the first training platform dedicated to the ecological transition, and why we are proud to collaborate with the Collège des Directeurs du Développement Durable (C3D) to design courses that develop sustainable thinking.
Support that is as personal as your experience on our platforms
To get to know you, we have a major ally: data. If you’ve played the All About Data playlist, we’re not teaching you anything, data is essential to designing a learning experience that reflects you. Indeed, by playing courses on our platforms, we are able to refine what we offer. So, training is really just a click away. But if our courses adapt to our learners, our platform also adapts to the needs of our clients, integrating directly into their training ecosystem. When we say that we know you well, it’s also because our team of Customer Success Managers supports you in your training projects, to achieve your objectives and those of your learners. We offer you concrete actions to engage your community of learners over time and reach new heights!
Sunday, 5:38 pm, I think of my grandmother’s madeleines. Determined to relive that emotion I feel at the first bite, I decide to cook. Without even thinking, the ingredients are already out on my work surface, from the eggs to the secret ingredient that I have never forgotten (and that I may reveal at the end of this article).
Some actions become mechanisms. By repeating a gesture, or by activating all our senses, we are able to learn much more efficiently. And it is by breaking the eggs in the bowl that I remember repeating this gesture when I was learning at my grandmother’s side how to make the madeleines that I loved so much.
The reason I remember it so well is precisely because I was able to learn while experimenting. I was active in my learning, I learnt the steps of the recipe, only to remember it 10 years later, without even realising it. And it’s not surprising, according to a lot of research, being active in your learning is one of the pillars of information retention.
This pedagogical approach is essential today, in a world where information is overwhelming us and where learners’ attention is increasingly selective. Thus, learning by being active, by participating, by mobilising one’s knowledge, would be more effective than passive learning, where the learner does not act or take any initiative. Thanks to technology and changing needs, training is becoming more diverse and offers more and more options for engaging learners, who are also dependent on this technology.
La pédagogie active peut se traduire par des cours sous forme de quiz, comme c’est le cas sur la plateforme Coorpacademy, dans le but de mobiliser les connaissances des apprenants en amont de la leçon, et de les faire interagir avec le contenu du cours. Si les quizz mobilisent l’attention des apprenants et permet d’ancrer les connaissances, les cours dont l’apprenant est le héros sont encore plus interactifs. En effet, les formats de cours adaptive – tel que le cours Le dilemme du prisonnier : coopérer ou tricher ? – où l’apprenant met concrètement en pratique les concepts vus dans la leçon dans un environnement fictif ou de “bureau”. Cette approche plus concrète permet d’appréhender les concepts de la leçon plus facilement, et de favoriser la rétention d’informations. Enfin, l’un des derniers contenus en date dans lequel les apprenants sont actifs et acteurs de leur apprentissage est l’enquête pédagogique : Cluedo ! Dans ce format inspiré du jeu mythique, les apprenants explorent le manoir Tudor et interroge les suspects pour élucider le meurtre de Monsieur Lenoir.
Active pedagogy can take the form of courses in the form of quizzes, as is the case on the Coorpacademy platform, with the aim of mobilising the learners’ knowledge before the lesson and getting them to interact with the course content. If quizzes mobilise the attention of learners and enable knowledge to be anchored, courses in which the learner is the hero are even more interactive. Indeed, adaptive course formats – such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Cooperate or Cheat? – where the learner puts into practice the concepts seen in the lesson in a fictional or “office” environment. This more concrete approach makes it easier to grasp the concepts in the lesson and encourages retention of information. Finally, one of the latest contents in which learners are active and involved in their learning is the educational investigation: Cluedo! In this format inspired by the mythical game, learners explore Tudor Manor and question suspects to solve the murder of Mr Boddy.
Diversifying teaching formats, offering interactive and fun content, are crucial to engage learners and stimulate their motivation. Because one of the key factors for successful learning is above all the motivation of the learners.
In order to cultivate an environment that encourages learning and the development of employees’ skills, it is important to promote active learning methods. This responsibility therefore requires the provision of a variety of pedagogical approaches, adapted to the expectations and needs of the learners.
Indeed, if my grandmother’s recipe for madeleines is still a mechanism, it is also thanks to the environment in which I was invited to learn, to do, to try. I was encouraged to do things. So the first bite was a real reward, which still motivates me to revise this recipe, whose secret ingredient is the desire to learn (and a dash of lemon, but that’s not really a secret since the Marmiton website exists)!
In 1987, the average lifetime of a technical skill was 30 years. Today, it varies between 12 and 18 months (OECD). As the obsolescence of technical skills increases, the HR function must both meet short-term requirements and think about the future of the organisation. So how do you meet this challenge and ensure the company’s long-term performance, while at the same time ensuring short-term results?
There is a duality within the company. It thinks and acts in the short term, but its survival depends on its long-term strategy. However, there is no question of rushing into emergencies, because survival also depends on a company’s ability to adapt and respond to fluctuations in its environment. Following the pandemic, it is now a certainty: the long term must supplant the short term. And if past events are not enough to convince you of this, the coming climate crisis shows us the importance of building for the future now.
The company’s main asset is its human capital, which is an essential pillar of its overall strategy. Strategic decisions are made taking this resource into account, and skills management then becomes a tool for deploying the company’s strategy. So-called “soft” skills are increasingly sought after, although technical knowledge is still valued, developing employees’ “soft skills” enables the company to promote profiles that are strong in adaptation, resilience, creativity and agility. These behavioural skills are a real competitive advantage in a context where the skills required vary and the environments are changing.
The HR function must therefore be able to align its strategy with that of the company, while taking into account its own changes within its environment. The major transformations that companies are undergoing today are strategic issues both for a company’s HR strategy and for its global strategy. It is therefore necessary to think about strategies in a common way, to coordinate efforts and to gather employees around the same objectives.
But in the day-to-day life of an HRD, long-term thinking is often interrupted by short-term emergencies. Thus, HR teams are reactive in the face of day-to-day problems but at the same time deploy strategies that respond to more global objectives such as recruitment, employer branding and training policies, all of which help to ensure the company’s sustainability and good health.
Thus, when it comes to building the competence development plan, HR teams have to think in the long term. Not least because of changing environments and evolving skills, it is crucial to build a learning culture within the company, in order to foster the agility of the company and all its employees. This is an essential skill to ensure long-term success.
So, to ensure the long-term development of skills, here are 5 questions to ask yourself as a training manager:
What skills will we need to follow our strategy in 5 years time?
How will we enable our employees to develop these skills?
Which skills will be obsolete in 2 years?
What are the current skills?
How and where can we develop the company’s untapped potential?
Faced with this reality, companies must constantly question the skills that make up the company. Identify those that will soon be obsolete, and those that will enable them to survive in an unstable environment. It is therefore crucial for companies to take into account the strategies put in place in the short term, in order to consider the consequences in the long term.
Training is above all a human adventure. It puts people at the heart of the company and helps the talents that make up the company to progress. Through the story of my experience, I would like to try to answer the following question: does the size of the company count when it comes to training?
Having had the opportunity to work within groups of different sizes and operating in different sectors or regions, I have always noticed a common denominator in these experiences: my desire to learn. Whether it was learning how to produce an editorial calendar, something very concrete, or developing my adaptability, a so-called soft skill, the size of the company was never a hindrance to progress. But then, if size doesn’t matter, what’s left to measure? To help you understand, let me tell you the story of my rise in skills.
Here we are 3 years ago, I land in Montreal, and I discover the queue to enter the bus. If I decided to join Céline, it’s not for the love of poutine but for an internship in a big international cosmetics company. The dream – with 20 degrees less. With more than 8,500 employees, this first experience in marketing will allow me to develop skills that will be essential to me later on… Because in addition to the management and coordination tasks that I carry out on a daily basis – and which I quickly adopted the basics of – I am developing an unfailing ability to adapt without even noticing it. FYI, I work in French with Quebecers who work half the time in English. Since Canada is an English and French speaking country, all communications are done in both languages, but not all communications can be adapted to both languages. I adapt the speech, change the slogans, arrange the visuals. And when I get back to France, I feel like I’ve become a chameleon who can’t wait to change my appearance.
I’m back in France, I’ve just got a work-study contract to validate my last year of a Master’s degree in Communication, I’m starting in 2 days. The chameleon that I have become is not disappointed: I will now work in a telemedicine start-up! A dream come true – minus the Quebec accent. From my very first days, I’m learning new tools, adopting a new tone in my communications and immersing myself in new subjects. Offering teleconsultations and understanding the care pathway is a bit different than selling perfumes and understanding different skin types. And while I’m gaining skills in the Adobe suite, developing my creativity and gaining self-confidence, something happens that turns my life upside down: a certain extremely contagious and dangerous virus has appeared in the Wuhan region. You already know the rest: confinement, teleworking, Zoom aperitif and increased screen time. For my company, which has about forty employees, the adaptation is fast, and that’s good because we are at the front line. Although size doesn’t matter when it comes to training employees, it does influence the available manpower. This is why I had the opportunity during this pivotal period to provide support for tasks other than those usually assigned to me. This experience and this unprecedented situation allowed me to develop resilience and flexibility. But as I finish my work placement and head towards the world of work, I know that I will miss the school benches because I am thirsty to learn… Unless?
Unless the world of work is finally similar to the school benches. To finish our story, we are – almost – out of the health crisis and I finally found my first job as a Community Manager! The dream – minus the terraces. So I work in a start-up that does digital learning. A platform for massively developing the skills of employees, while meeting the needs of each learner. If joining a digital learning company makes it easier to increase your skills – I admit it – I discovered that, in the end, what I want to do later on is learn. Indeed, today I have understood that the common denominator of my employability, and above all of my motivation, is to progress, to improve myself, to adapt my skills to my environment. And as my environment is constantly changing, the chameleon that I am wants to learn continuously.
Thus, I have noticed through the writing of this article that all my experiences have led me to mobilise essential soft skills. Adaptation, resilience, creativity, team spirit, stress management, etc. are the soft skills that I have developed and nurtured throughout my professional life. The development of my skills is mainly based on my motivation and, to a certain extent, on the tools or situations that allow it. If the size of the company does not matter for my motivation to learn, the tools that will be made available to me can be influenced by this factor. In 2015, the inequality of opportunity in terms of training is reflected in the figures: the proportion of employees who received training in 2015 increases significantly with the size of the company employing them: 25% in the 10-19 employee group, 29% in the 20-49 group and 41% in the 50-249 group. These figures then increase to 58% above 250 employees, and to 63% above 500. Employees of large companies are therefore proportionally two and a half times more likely to have been trained in 2015.
This is why it is crucial that all companies, regardless of the number of employees, should be able to offer – and be offered – training that is engaging, impactful and accessible from anywhere. In conclusion, to train effectively, let’s not measure the size of the company, but rather measure the commitment of learners to develop their skills and the relevance of the devices put in place.
Are you a company with less than 250 employees and are you looking to develop your staff rapidly and massively? Discover Team by Coorpacademy, the training offer specially designed for start-ups and SMEs! Take advantage of a 15-day free trial – only available in French: https://coorpteam.coorpacademy.com
Having just arrived on Skill Island, the seven members of the Newcleus research laboratory’s party committee soon lose one of their number in tragic circumstances. What happened to poor Mr Boddy? While everything seems to point to an accident, Colonel Mustard suspects… murder! He decides to investigate on the sly… Who could have had it in for the good man? With what weapon was he killed? And in which room of the house did the murder take place? These answers are up to you to find, thanks to the clues that have been misplaced in the sumptuous house. It’s up to you to play detective, it’s up to you to play…
Clue !
With more than 150 million copies sold worldwide since 1950 – including 4 million in France – the mythical board game developed by Hasbro® has been invited onto the Coorpacademy platforms to make your employees the heroes of their training.
Discover this new educational format through 3 clues on the backstage of this partnership!
Clue 1 – An iconic and entertaining partnership
Building on the success of the Trivial Pursuit courses, our partnership with Hasbro continues to enrich our training offer through the world-famous game Clue. Making learning more fun is one of our core beliefs and engaging employees in training is one of our daily missions. Therefore, we are constantly looking for innovative and entertaining formats, so that the learner is a real actor in the course they are playing.
With this new learning innovation, the learners of the Coorpacademy platforms have the opportunity to develop their skills through a game that they know well, and which mobilises their full attention! Indeed, a good detective must be critical…
Clue n°2 – A formative and playful investigation!
In Coorpacademy’s Clue investigation, your objective is to understand who is behind the murder of Mr Boddy… To solve this crime, you will have to discover as many clues as possible by exploring the manor and questioning the five suspects. But be careful… they will mislead you, knowingly or not! Your critical thinking skills will be essential to unravel the truth.
This skill, identified as indispensable by 2025 by the World Economic Forum, enables people to learn how to construct rigorous reasoning in order to achieve an objective, or to analyse facts in order to formulate a judgment.
Clue 3 – An immersive learning experience
You are now in the shoes of the famous Colonel Mustard! You have access to the different rooms of the manor. These are full of clues that you can manipulate to gather all the information you need to solve your investigation. Pssst… the mansion is so big, it also hides secret passages. Pay attention, they might help you to identify the real culprit…
Set sail for Skill Island, a windy island, and find the seven members of the Newcleus research lab’s party committee! Hurry, one of them will soon disappear under strange circumstances… Start the investigation!
It knows you better than anyone else, adapts to your desires, and facilitates your access to choice pieces: the course playlist, a new feature of the Team offer.
Monday morning, you open your favourite music streaming application and on the home screen, you hesitate. Are you more in the mood to discover the new releases of the month or to listen to your classics again? You’ll opt for your favourite playlist, but you’re not sure if the transition from that little alternative rock band you’ve just discovered to Adele’s latest album will go smoothly – then you feel like starting the week on a pop note, Adele, that’s for a rainy Sunday night.
On any platform, from music streaming to binge-watching giants, personalisation is key. To engage users, it is crucial to simplify their experience on a platform. Because on Monday morning, while you’re wavering between two musical styles, you also get 2 WhatsApp messages, 3 LinkedIn notifications and a reminder for Friday lunchtime: finish the Excel file for accounting. Ouch, Excel is not your forte.
So instead of browsing your playlists on Spotify, you decide to take the subject in hand! On Team by Coorpacademy, your company’s new e-learning offering, you discover a simple interface and quickly identify the ideal playlist to fill in your gaps by Friday. Having become an ace in office automation, you excel on Friday lunchtime, and the auditory dilemma of Monday morning is transformed into a learning dilemma between the playlist “Understanding digital and e-commerce” or “Make your teams more agile”.
As you will have understood, organising training content in the form of playlists is an effective way of customising and simplifying the learning experience. Specially designed for start-ups and SMEs, the new Team by Coorpacademy offer aims to facilitate access to training for smaller companies. Following interviews with start-up and SME managers, their needs and constraints have been clearly identified. Their employees need to be trained on a massive scale and quickly in subjects that are strategic for the company. This is why the Team offer is adapted to their expectations and proposes our catalogue of premium content organised in the form of playlists, in order to simplify learning on the platform.
The Team offer – available in French only for now – includes 17 carefully selected course themes to stimulate employee productivity, including digital culture, social networks, sales performance, agile management, language learning, office automation, etc. Indeed, following interviews with start-up and SME managers, these topics were mentioned as essential for the competitiveness and strategic development of companies with less than 250 employees:
Don’t make any more mistakes when writing!
Master professional English
Express yourself perfectly in writing and speaking
Succeed in your team management
Manage your projects with agility
Develop your learning skills
Optimise your time management
Learn to manage your emotions at work
How to combine teleworking and performance
Digital security: adopt the right reflexes!
Strengthen your digital culture
Use and value data
Initiate the sustainable transformation of your company
Corporate Social Responsibility: take action!
Promote diversity and inclusion in your company
Succeed in all your sales
Become an outstanding negotiator
Test the Team offer in French for free for 15 days by clicking here!
Organising skills development in the form of playlists simplifies access to knowledge and makes it more fluid. Simplifying the learners’ experience encourages the development of new habits. The aim is for them to develop a real desire to learn, a boundless curiosity, and a good capacity to retain information. And simplifying the learner experience encourages these behaviours.
Your music streaming application knows your tastes by heart, so it can recommend the best content for you. Within the playlists it recommends to you, it identifies the music genres and artists you like. On your e-learning platform, we also observe your behaviour within the course playlists, so that we can then offer you courses that are better suited to your profile, your level, or to guide you towards a related subject!
Get 15 days trial to test the new Team offer in French 👉 https://coorpteam.coorpacademy.com/coming-soon-in-english/
To prepare employees for the world of tomorrow, the Coorpacademy team is always on the lookout for the latest skills to develop. In order to offer relevant training content, our teams are made up of diverse talents who are always highly motivated by the idea of transmitting. Because our objective is to meet the expectations of learners and make them want to learn, like all learning managers in the world, we mobilise certain skills in our teams to guarantee the best learning experience.
But what skills do our teams need to develop in order to best meet learners’ expectations?
Learning to learn
Our team of educational engineers is responsible for creating the courses in the Coorpacademy premium content catalogue. Therefore, our team has to learn continuously, to provide content adapted to each theme and to enrich the courses to be updated. By enriching their knowledge on a daily basis, our teams are also more aware of the specificities and constraints of effective learning, in order to propose the best pedagogy for the content in question. By improving our ability to learn, we also understand the mechanisms of learning. How is our brain predisposed to learn? What are the keys to successful learning? By developing this skill, our teams are ready to provide effective learning content that is tailored to the workings of the brain! Then… If we are not able to learn to learn as learning professionals, who will?
Go further by boosting your learning capacity with Sciences et Vie :
Adaptation is a watchword within our teams, because learning is a challenge for every company, regardless of its size or sector of activity. Therefore, our teams cultivate their adaptability on a daily basis by working in collaboration with our clients’ business experts on the development of tailor-made courses. We make it a point of honour to adapt to each type of knowledge, each type of environment and each content objective. In addition, our courses are based on the principle of reversed pedagogy. This approach, which aims to engage our learners in their learning, requires our teams to be very adaptable, as we have to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who is new to a subject. When writing course questions, our teams make every effort to adapt the discourse to each target and each level of difficulty. Adapting also means having the ability to master several subjects at the same time. By working on both courses on digital culture in business and on themes related to cultural or ecological transformation, our teams develop an extraordinary level of adaptation.
Test your adaptability with the Coorpacademy test!
Because as a Learning & Development professional we want to offer the best learning experience, we need to think about our content, and the way we deliver it, for the user. The learning experience is crucial to engaging learners and making training effective. So all of our teams are working to continually improve the UX (user experience) of our platforms and the way courses are delivered. And because we want our learners to have fun learning, we also develop pedagogical innovations such as the interactive series Suspects or the Cybercafé podcast series. The learning experience is then fun and engaging, so that the training has a real impact and our users integrate the training into their daily lives!
Learn all about user experience with the Coorpacademy course:
In order to build the best online training experience, our teams develop a continuous digital culture. As well as being useful for using different digital tools on a daily basis, this skill is essential for developing your online reputation and communicating with as many people as possible. Therefore, we develop our digital dexterity on a daily basis, by developing our courses but also by talking to you on social networks! By the way, are you already following us on Linkedin?
Travel in a few clicks to the world of traffic generation levers in the digital era with the Coorpacademy course:
Finally, working as a Learning & Development professional means developing one’s own skills on an ongoing basis, to enable our learners’ skills to grow. And promoting a learning culture within companies means considering each learner, their expectations, their needs and their potential to transform the company.
Finally, discover the course co-published with Numa, ideal for creating conditions that help your employees to learn continuously:
Did you know that 70% of French people are pessimistic about the future of the planet, and for 93% of them, protecting the environment is an important issue, and almost half of them even consider it to be a priority issue. The barometer “The French and their carbon footprint” published by Odoxa on September 16, 2021 does not surprise us that much. The climate crisis is the fight of the century, and companies are increasingly taking up these issues – and that’s good! However, more than half of the French people questioned in this study believe that neither their companies (55%), nor the State and local authorities (60%), nor the inhabitants of their regions (61%) encourage them to reduce their carbon footprint.
To transform the company, turning off the lights behind you and making great speeches is no longer enough, you have to learn about the new issues and behaviors that the ecological transition implies, as well as understand the mechanisms! So, are you ready to develop the skills to last?
Sustainable thinking
In order to last, we must be able to project ourselves into the future and therefore think sustainably. This skill, which was not defined until a few years ago, and which has just been integrated into the Coorpacademy catalog, is essential for reinventing a business model which takes into account the environmental stakes and limits which frame the activities of a company. By developing the sustainable thinking of your employees, you ensure the sustainability of your company.
To initiate the sustainable thinking of your teams, discover the course on “The circular economy: from the straight line to the virtuous circle” co-edited with MySezame.
According to the latest IPCC report, a rise in average global temperatures of more than 1.5°C would have disastrous consequences on ecosystems and natural earth systems. Megafires, rising waters, threatened species, droughts, destruction of ecosystems… The world of tomorrow will be nothing like the one we know today. Therefore, to exist in a world that is unknown to us, and unpredictable, the strength of adaptation and resilience are crucial skills.
Prepare yourself for tomorrow’s world by learning to evolve in a VUCA environment through our Coorpacademy course!
The challenges of the ecological transition are numerous, and above all, new. From today, we are facing unprecedented ecological disasters, and the solutions are therefore in essence innovative. Therefore, in order to reinvent our ways of thinking, our behaviors and our economy, we must be capable of creativity and innovation. Thinking outside the box, being able to imagine a world totally different from ours and being able to implement new processes are essential skills to accompany the ecological transition.
Discover the Creativity and Innovation course to develop an atmosphere conducive to brainstorming and to fostering an atmosphere of innovation!
Because the ecological transition is initiated through training, we recently launched a CSR focus animation on all our platforms, to ensure the development of skills in the fight against the climate crisis. Thus, all learners had access to 20 questions on sustainable transformation, to test their knowledge and get up to speed on the challenges of the ecological transition!
HR Tech Show 16/10: How can successful offboarding help a company’s employer brand?
-Alexia : Hello Arnauld. So, is this your last column?
Hi Alexia. Yes indeed… But I’m not sad: to prepare my topic, I read a lot of articles on offboarding, i.e. the support given to employees when they leave, and I understood that this stage should be played down! So everything is going well!
What’s more, with Julie, your producer, as I’m sure you’re concerned about your “employer brand”, I feel that you’ve organised a great farewell party, bringing together all the guests from the last 6 weeks, Quentin and Arnaud, your Minute Geek columnists, and so on… Did you collect a lot of money for my fund?
-Alexia : But Arnauld, none of that… I’d like to remind you that you’re our partner and also a businessman, not a BFM Business employee!
Ah ? OK… You’re right… I think I got carried away reading all those articles on the proper management of departures…
Because it’s true that if the offboarding process is well formalised in the company, everything should go like clockwork: handing over of files, internal announcement, departure review, etc., etc…
It is easy to understand why the departure must go well: the former employee must remain an ambassador for the company he or she is leaving. And we all know the ravages of a bad review on the internet.
It’s true, Alexia, we all have an example of a hotel where, despite the 100 positive reviews we’ve just read, all we have to do is come across the one that says “the bathroom was dirty”, and we think “ah yes, but maybe not, so in fact…”.
-Alexia: Yes, that’s for sure. That must speak to a lot of people!
Well, Alexia, it’s the same thing in the recruitment world! Are you familiar with the Glassdoor website?
-Alexia: Yes of course!
So it’s an anonymous rating site for companies by employees, past and present. And it’s not to be taken lightly! The site claims to have 50 million unique visitors each month who come to view reviews of over 800,000 companies worldwide. Company reviews, interview stories, salary information. The site even allows you to compare two companies. Useful if you are hesitating between two job offers.
On paper, the promise of this type of site is tempting: to offer candidates a more realistic representation of a company than that conveyed by its corporate site.
Obviously, as with customer review sites, this also raises many questions: the representativeness of the reviews (aren’t it often the disgruntled who are most likely to post reviews?), the veracity of the reviews (some companies encourage their employees who are still in post to give their reviews), the business model (these sites earn their living by charging companies for services).
When questioned, candidates themselves say they are a bit dubious (according to a study found on the CAIRN portal).
Nevertheless! According to Glassdoor data, 2 thirds of candidates read at least 5 reviews before making up their mind about the company they are considering joining!
So, to avoid damaging your employer brand, you have no choice but to leave well enough alone. Hence the importance of a good departure management process!
-Alexia: You don’t seem very convinced Arnauld…
Of course I am!
The web has given a tremendous power to all users, to be able to give their opinion and potentially share it with the rest of the world. In many areas, this has rebalanced the balance of power between the business world (hotels or restaurants as well as employers) and the user world (customers as well as employees or candidates).
It is a great power and as Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility”.
So be careful never to abuse it…
HR Tech Show 09/10: The need to work on your emotional intelligence in the age of artificial intelligence
Alexia, today it’s not really a column that I’m proposing to you: we’re more in the field of news, of scoop!
-Alexia: Really?
Yes! Breaking News: To measure a person’s intelligence, it’s not enough to measure their intelligence quotient, their IQ, you also have to take into account their emotional intelligence, i.e. our capacity to recognise, understand and analyse our emotions, but also to deal with the emotions of others!
-Alexia: Well yes, but Arnauld, everyone knows that, it’s even the theme of today’s programme!
Yes, you’re right, Alexia, I know I’m pushing an open door…
And yet, several surprising things struck me during the preparation of this column.
The first is that the notion of EQ, emotional quotient, is very recent. About thirty years ago. Whereas the notion of IQ dates back well over a century.
In the business world, this means that for decades, the major criterion for evaluating an employee’s performance was considered to be his or her IQ, and that emotions (ours and those of others) had no place in the office.
The second is that many companies have not yet grasped the importance of emotional intelligence. According to a recent study by Capgemini, only 40% of them test the EQ of candidates when hiring, and less than 1 in 5 companies train all their employees in the development of emotional intelligence.
-Alexia: ah yes, that’s low.
Yes, it’s not much. Especially if you subscribe to the thesis of Daniel Goleman, doctor in psychology and pioneer in the field, who states that two thirds of a company’s results are due to the emotional skills of its managers.
Why is this? Because our emotions are intimately linked to our ability to think and make decisions.
So without awareness and management of our emotions and those of others, we risk making bad choices.
Let’s take a concrete example. Many managers may find themselves confronted with feelings of fear: fear of not delivering results, fear of disappointing their superiors or fear of giving feedback to an employee who may threaten to leave the company. If we don’t know how to control this feeling, this fear can lead to immobility (it’s better to do nothing than to do something wrong), to avoidance (I’d rather not offend him, I need him too much), or to excessive pressure on a team (my stress becomes your stress because we have to meet our objectives!).
-Alexia: So what should we do?
Well, the good news is that unlike IQ, which is relatively static, EQ can change. It is no coincidence that the World Economic Forum has included in its list of 10 soft skills that every employee will need by 2025 many elements related to emotional intelligence: resilience, stress management, flexibility, but also leadership or social influence… Training platforms offering catalogues to work on these soft skills, such as ours, but there are of course other examples, contribute to increasing the competence of all employees on these subjects.
In short, in the age of Artificial Intelligence, we need to work on our Emotional Intelligence!
But we can dream of a world where children are taught to work on their emotional intelligence right from school. Many experiments conducted in the United States and Europe show that children obtain better results, free themselves from their anxieties and approach life more serenely.
Because, Alexia, it’s not necessarily those who had the best results at school who were the most successful professionally, is it?
-Alexia: That’s right, we all have a few examples in mind…
In the world of work, is EQ more important than IQ?
Probably, since in most jobs we work with other human beings…
And remembering this can’t hurt, even if it’s not a scoop…
HR Tech show of 02/10: Is commitment at the heart of knowledge transmission?
-Alexia: So Arnauld, has the topic of Story Learning inspired you this week?
Well, Alexia, you’re not thinking straight. I’ll even tell you a little story:
Once upon a time, in the wonderful land of knowledge, there was a beautiful princess who loved to learn. Unfortunately, her teachers were so boring that she often took a nose dive. When she woke up, like a curse cast on her, she had systematically forgotten everything.
One day, after a particularly boring lesson, she fell asleep for good: she was called…
-Alexia: Sleeping Beauty?
Exactly!
100 years passed.
A prince, who was passing by, had the idea to teach her what he knew by presenting it as a novel.
She woke up, having retained and understood everything as if by magic!
They lived happily ever after and had many children…
… And posted pictures of their happiness on Instagram regularly, but that’s another subject…
Did you like it?
-Alexia: yes, but why are you telling me this?
Well, Alexia, what I have tried to do through this little tale is to engage you in my story. And why? Because engagement is at the heart of the transmission of knowledge.
So, in truth, it’s not really new. I would even say that it is in our genes! In fact, most animals learn through play, because play stimulates and encourages the anchoring of knowledge. In the end, it was only man who once imagined that teaching should be serious and grave.
Be careful, I say “serious AND severe”, and therein lies the misunderstanding! Because you can say serious things without being severe (as we try to demonstrate every week, don’t we?)
-Alexia: Absolutely!
What the animals do through these games is what we should all dream of: learning without even realising it, like Mr Jourdain who writes prose without knowing it (a little cultural reference while we are at it… ;))
The good news is that for several years now, we have been seeing a lot of initiatives that go in this direction, even in the world of continuing education, i.e. in companies, which are undeniably the realm of seriousness and gravity!
I am thinking, for example, of the English company Video Arts, founded almost 50 years ago by John Cleese, a former Monty Python, which produces training videos with a very English sense of humour in which good managerial behaviour is demonstrated, but through the absurd. Their cult training is called “Meetings, Bloody meetings”.
-Alexia: quite a programme indeed!
Another example: Duolingo, a mobile application for learning languages through games, has 300 million users worldwide and offers, in addition to the 38 languages available, to teach you more exotic languages, such as “Klingon”, the fictional language of Star Trek!
On our training platform, we have been offering our users courses on general culture for the past two years, which we designed with Trivial Pursuit, where you have to win, module after module, all the colours of the pie chart, just like in the real game.
To go further, in a few weeks we’re launching a series with Cluedo, where to help Colonel Mustard solve the enigma of Mr Boddy’s death, users will have to mobilise their negotiation, active listening and empathy skills… Serious skills, used without even realising it, as if we were playing a board game!
-Alexia: Is this what we call gamification?
Yes and no. The word “gamification” implies taking something serious and trying to make it fun. This is often not the case.
If we dream that users will one day talk about our training content as they do at the coffee machine when talking about the latest series, it is better to do the opposite: start with the codes of entertainment, of the game, and add some seriousness.
We can then talk about entertaining: entertainment + learning.
And if everyone gets on board, learning throughout our lives will become, with a wave of a magic wand, a real fairy tale…
HR Tech Show of 25/09: HR predictive tools: Big data or Big brother?
The dream, Alexia, the dream! Predictive HR tools now allow us to recruit the best performers, detect the highest potential and offer them personalised career paths, or even predict the resignations of key employees.
A dream, I tell you!
But I have a doubt: would I be sitting in front of you right now if you had used this type of tool to select your columnists?
-Alexia: Who knows! I don’t know…
Anyway, Big Brother has just been appointed HRD.
As a company director, I know that recruitment and career management are among the most difficult exercises in the life of a company.
So the prospect offered by its Big Data-based tools is very promising.
Successful examples can be cited, such as the “My Itinerary” application set up by Orange a little over ten years ago, which enables each employee to visualise possible career paths, open positions and training courses that he or she can follow based on the skills that he or she currently possesses.
Still on the subject of training, on the platform that we offer to our clients, the behaviour of all users is stored anonymously and then processed in order to feed the course recommendations that we make to each person connected, to try to best match their needs for skill enhancement.
In terms of recruitment, a study by the very serious Harvard Business Review shows that by using algorithms, the employees hired perform 25% better on average than when a human makes the decision. Why is this? Because our brains are excellent when it comes to collecting the data needed to make a decision, but pretty bad when it comes to weighing up the pros and cons between several hypotheses.
We can also cite the case of those companies that analyse the weak signals sent, sometimes in spite of themselves, by employees (travel time, remuneration, number of projects managed or absenteeism) to anticipate and possibly avoid departures.
-Alexia: So why so much reluctance?
Well, Alexia, it’s the word “predictive” that raises questions. Because everyone knows that predicting the future is very difficult, if not impossible: Nostradamus and Paco Rabanne have paid the price…
I am thinking, for example, of my favourite streaming platform which, in the “recommended for you” section, only offers me cartoons since I had the misfortune to watch Winnie the Pooh with my children from my profile.
Or that recent day when an online merchant started suggesting that I buy a banknote counter, probably thinking that I had just started trafficking in some way…
These two examples are of course not serious, I just don’t click and everything is forgotten.
But when it comes to applying Big Data to the upstream selection of candidates’ files, for example, you have to be well aware of the limits that such a system can present.
For example, Alexia, do you believe that a person’s future job can be determined in advance?
-Alexia: So from a technological, technical point of view, no, I don’t think so. I think that we can still change our minds at the last moment, have an epiphany!
That would mean that our individual desires and motivations are so secondary that they don’t count in our professional decision-making.
Not easy to admit, is it?
Even Google has backtracked on the use of Big Data in recruitment, admitting that after analysing tens of thousands of resumes, combing through interviews, and looking at the performance of recruits, they found no correlation…
Predictive systems work well when the past looks like the future, i.e. in environments with little change.
But recent history has shown us that our repositories can completely change in a few months, days or even hours.
So, yes, HR Big Data! Of course it is!
But only if you have the choice to click. Or not…
HR Tech Show of 18/09: Onboarding, why do first impressions play such a determining role?
Alexia, you arrived not so long ago on BFM Business, would you say that you had a good onboarding?
– Alexia: I was lucky enough to have a great producer, Julie Cohen, whom I salute, and yes, she was superb with me anyway, so very good onboarding.
Well, you’re lucky, because a lot of employees who joined their new company during the chaotic period we’ve just been through have found it rather difficult: 100% digital, to make a place for yourself in a new environment, it has its limits!
Especially as first impressions of the new company, even in ‘normal’ times, play a determining role in the future.
Did you know, Alexia, that according to a 2018 study, 1 in 5 employees leave their company within the first 3 months, and 4% even leave on the first day?
– Alexia: I didn’t expect that much!
So the first few days are key!
So how do you make a good impression when you are a company and you welcome a new employee?
Probably, to start with, by realising that you need an onboarding process… Don’t laugh, a study by Mercuri Urval shows that ⅔ of companies don’t have one. Or didn’t have one…
Because the good news is that the health crisis has forced companies to look into the subject (how do you welcome someone in the middle of a lockdown?) and therefore to speed up the digitalisation of the onboarding process.
The bad news? It sometimes boiled down to: meetings with colleagues via Zoom/Teams/Meet, e-aperos on Zoom/Teams/Meet, weekly plenary sessions on Zoom/Teams/Meet… Not easy to develop a sense of belonging to a group in these conditions!
-Alexia: So what is the right formula?
Well, as in many areas, the right answer is probably hybridisation, a clever mix of digital and physical. With the gradual return to the office, many things are becoming possible again. In our company, for example, we have just launched a board game for new employees, where each week they have to discover their job and the company culture in order to advance in their quest to become a real “coorper”, as our employees call themselves.
But there are some areas that lend themselves particularly well to digital, such as the training of newcomers. Of course, this does not mean replacing the direct transmission of knowledge by peers. But the digitalisation of business training, or training on products and services, has the advantage of structuring the discourse and thus avoiding the unintentional omission of certain elements that may seem too obvious to the most experienced employees.
This type of training also makes it possible to quickly make remote employees operational, for example in networks of shops or franchisees.
A final example of an induced benefit: these digital training courses can also bring employees who have been with the company for a long time and who sometimes no longer dare or cannot admit that they do not know everything up to speed.
Finally, a clear distinction must be made between the provision of knowledge about the business, a task that can be given to an employee who will be called, for example, the newcomer’s coach, and the transmission of the company culture, the whole informal part. This last function can be entrusted to another employee who can be called a Mentor or Buddy.
Because we must not forget that the grail of successful onboarding is not that the newcomer develops a FEELING of belonging, but rather a PIERCE of belonging.
And the nuance is important…
HR Tech Show of 11/09: Back to school in 2021, campuses continue their digital transition
“Classrooms are dead! Long live classrooms!” This little phrase may well sum up the paradox that university and secondary school campuses are facing today, just like most companies.
Indeed, after long months of forced distance learning, the majority of students want to return to the classroom, but beware of “not like before either”!
(And it’s exactly the same when we ask employees in companies: “we want to come back, but not all the time. we want to be flexible!)
This is where the puzzle begins: how to manage “Blended Learning”? That is, the combination of physical and distance learning. Because all whisky lovers know that it is not enough to mix blindly to obtain a good product!
At the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where we have premises, an eminent professor told me, in view of this column, that the students cannot stand even a week of non-stop online classes. So they tried hybrid systems with one third of the students in class and two thirds by video conference. But as with meetings of this type in companies, it is difficult to manage: those in the room forget those who are at a distance and interactions between the teacher and the students become complicated.
Not to mention the “digital inequality” issues! It is enough to note our dismay when faced with an ADSL connection or when our mobile phone indicates that we are on 3G (??!!)
A good idea is undoubtedly, beyond the tools, to rethink the “traditional” teaching protocol, i.e. lessons in class and exercises at home.
In Lausanne, a small quarter of the teachers have opted for the flipped classroom: online lessons at home and face-to-face sessions dedicated to questions and practical work.
Students appreciate the “framed” autonomy offered to them as well as the changing role of the teacher who becomes a “companion” during classroom sessions.
A study has shown that this face-to-face practical work was crucial for understanding and anchoring knowledge: at the beginning of the practical session and after having followed the online courses, only 25% of the students in the study obtained the average in the knowledge test. At the end of the session with the teacher, 75% of them obtained the average on the same test.
The teacher’s support remains at the heart of the success of a flipped classroom: phew!
The question now is whether the results obtained by the students are better than those obtained with the traditional teaching protocol, and here the answer seems less obvious, with some studies showing that they are, and others showing that the results are the same. What is certain is that no study on the subject has shown a drop in results with the flipped classroom!
OK… Great…
But are there ways to go further? For example, can we imagine distance learning exams? Not only can we imagine it, but it already exists. In the Anglo-Saxon world, they are called “take home exams” or in French “tests non supervised”. This is a test given to students to take when they want to without supervision within a given time frame. It is usually open book. It is particularly applicable when students’ ability to apply knowledge to a specific situation, context or problem is to be assessed: a case study for example. In short, to cases where there is no ready-made answer.
Of course, there is the problem of “cheating”, in this case getting help from someone (because obviously copying texts is no longer possible with the widespread use of anti-plagiarism software). As a result, it is still necessary to alternate this type of examination with more traditional classroom examinations to validate the acquisition of skills.
But these exams, which are based on the empowerment of students by offering them autonomy and therefore flexibility, are increasingly used on campus: another good way of mixing on-campus and “virtual” moments.
We are all convinced that we will not go back to the old world. What students want is not so different from what we all want: the best of the campus of the past (social interactions) + the best of the campus of today (autonomy and flexibility offered by the tools) = the campus of tomorrow.
And, but really, that’s the equation of progress, isn’t it?
Today, we are proud to celebrate the commitment of the learners of the Learning Lab, Faurecia’s training platform! Since 2016, learners have spent over 1 million hours training through the Coorpacademy premium content catalogue.
Behind these 1,000,000 hours of training are:
🔥 90,402 connected users
🚀 30 million questions answered
🤯 461 MOOCs published
🙌 A motivated HR team invested in the skills development of its employees!
Since its launch, the Coorpacademy “Learning Lab” platform has been a real tool to engage all employees in the company’s strategic transformation. With more than 90,000 active learners, Faurecia integrates digital learning into the daily lives of its employees, so that they learn continuously.
For the past four years, our team of Customer Success Managers and our educational engineers have been working with Faurecia to create customised courses to acculturate and train employees in subjects that meet the challenges of the business and the transformation. A rhythmic communication system has also been put in place to promote the content made available, through games and competitions based on the platform’s gaming tools.
The result? 1,000,000 hours of training and employees who are agents of change.
