Author: Rédaction Blog

Why it is paramount to assess your skills and to continuously learn

 

“Education must be universal, that is, extended to all citizens. […] It must, in its various degrees, embrace the entire system of human knowledge, and ensure that men, at all ages, can keep their knowledge and acquire new knowledge.

By thus continuing education throughout life, we will prevent the knowledge acquired in schools from being erased too quickly from memory, we will maintain in our minds a useful activity; the people will be taught new laws, […] economic methods which it is important not to ignore. We can finally show people the art of learning for and by themselves […]. These means of learning, which in a wider education one acquires by habit alone, must be directly taught in an instruction limited to a shorter time, and to a small number of lessons.”

“L’instruction doit être universelle, c’est-à-dire s’étendre à tous les citoyens. […] Elle doit, dans ses divers degrés, embrasser le système tout entier des connaissances humaines, et assurer aux hommes, dans tous les âges de la vie, la facilité de conserver leurs connaissances et d’en acquérir de nouvelles.

These sentences, which advocate lifelong learning, the need to always train, test yourself and learn new things, were neither spoken by the visionary CEO of an innovative digital learning company, nor by an enlightened philosopher theorizing the new management methods of the 21st century. They are the work of Nicolas de Condorcet, a French mathematician, philosopher, writer and politician. This happened in April 1792, in a report presented to the Legislative Assembly.

More than 200 years later, things have changed, but lifelong learning has grown even more. Rooted in this 4th industrial revolution, which is led by speed, lifelong learning seems to be the only way to tackle the skills revolution as seamlessly as possible. In a report published in 2020, the World Economic Forum even says it’s an “emergency”.

“The world is facing a reskilling emergency.

More than 1 billion jobs, almost one-third of all jobs worldwide, are likely to be transformed by technology in the next decade, according to OECD estimates. By just 2022, the World Economic Forum estimates 133 million new jobs in major economies will be created to meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

How can we ensure people around the world are not left behind? We must come together – governments, businesses and society – to provide education, skills and jobs for at least 1 billion people by 2030.

And, as a sign of the transformations to come and the need to continually challenge one’s skills to face the uncertainties of the future, Alvin Toffler, American writer, sociologist and futurologist, told us that: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

This picture of lifelong learning that began to take shape over 200 years ago is now more tangible than ever. Continuous learning, where everyone is in control of their employability and their actions, in order to face the uncertainties of the future, becomes necessary. And above all, learning does not stop at school, but must continue during our professional lives.

There’s an emergency – but we lack time

A Josh Bersin study for Deloitte had described today’s corporate learner. Overwhelmed by his workload: 2/3 of respondents complaining that they did not have time to do their work. Impatient too, spending no more than 4 minutes on a video, with an attention span on a website between 5 and 10 seconds. Finally, today’s learners are distracted, unlocking their smartphones up to 9 times an hour or connecting online an average of 27 times a day. The study also shows that employees are likely to be interrupted by external sources, whether they are virtual, real interactions or their own interruptions, when they start devoting themselves fully to a task. Sometimes every 5 minutes. A short period of time.

Do we really have time in our professional daily lives to engage in long training sessions, where knowledge is transmitted from top to bottom, between the trainer, the one who knows, who transmits, and the learner, the one who records the knowledge?

To find this time, digital training, through its principles of massification, ubiquity, speed of diffusion, can help. Another advantage: digital training puts the learner in an active learning position. Learners become the ones who decide to learn, who decide of their own training pathways, no longer confined to a passive way of learning.

It seems to be getting harder to argue with every day: learning how to learn, unlearn and relearn – and above all to do it by yourself, through digital training for example – has become necessary to face the uncertainties of tomorrow. But how, then, do we get started?

Test yourself!

Why not by starting to evaluate your level on the skills identified by the World Economic Forum as crucial for the next decade?

To see what is your level, what is to be improved, what there is to explore. To build your own individualized learning path. And finally, to focus your efforts on complementary and essential skills that will make you avoid the trap of the “illiteracy of the 21st century”, according to Alvin Toffler.

Our instructional designers team have has put together a 40 question test on the Coorpacademy platform, assessing your level on 20 essential skills divided into 4 families: Digital; Leadership & Management; Creativity & Agility; Communication.

In 12 minutes, you will assess your level on those skills, including digital risks awareness, active listening, public speaking, creativity, innovation, agility, time management or even conflict management. And the list goes on.

By the way, we have noticed that all learners who have taken at least one assessment become more studious. The duration of their learning sessions is 36 minutes against 20 minutes on average, which represent 80% more time!

So, before getting started, evaluate your level!

At the end of the test, you will get qualitative feedback on what you have mastered and what remains to be improved. But you’ll also be certain that you will be defining your own individualized self-training pathway that will best prepare you for the uncertainties of the decade to come!

Assess your soft skills

This is not a MacGuffin… Or is it?

 

What is there in common with movies such as Pulp Fiction, The 39 Steps or Casablanca? All three of them are perfect examples of scenarios built on the use of a MacGuffin. A new sandwich from the one famous fast food brand? A Scottish peated single malt whisky producer? None of that. Besides, the name of MacGuffin means… nothing. But its importance in movies and narrative arts is paramount. Are you now desperate to know what is a MacGuffin? Fortunate coincidence: one of the MacGuffin function is to grab the viewers’ attention. Without further ado, let’s dive in…

“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin’. The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.”

Alfred Hitchcock

The MacGuffin is a very simple storyline concept, defined by Alfred Hitchcock in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University in New York City: it’s an object – tangible or intangible – which pretexts the development of a storyline, of a story. Coveted by one or numerous main characters, the MacGuffin doesn’t have a lot of interest for the viewer but to spark curiosity. The characters’ quest and their adventures only will matter. This is how Hitchcock sees the MacGuffin: as the cornerstone of several thrillers, spy or adventure movies. The MacGuffin, either a diamond, a secret formula, a statuette or a military secret, must be forgotten once the stake is set up. Its nature can in some cases reinforce the mystery around the story, but that’s it.  

Since Hitchcock theorized the MacGuffin, its definition has evolved due to directors’, authors and critics largesses, so that today, any object – or even character – that’s used to launch a story can be called a MacGuffin. According to theories, Indiana Jones movies artefacts, the Rosebud word in Citizen Kane or even the colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now would be MacGuffins. These objects, concepts or characters, are indeed used as launch pads for the story to start but they’re clearly distinguished from Hitchcock’s original concept. Because they’re paramount for the story and its solving. Nothing is very different in the end from the concept of quest, essential for the story until the very last minutes of the movie.

The interest of the MacGuffin lies into its pretext function: paramount in its form, but not that important in its substance. This narrative process reveals itself to be very useful when we build here at Coorpacademy “Be the hero of your own learning adventure” courses (pedagogical and narrative modules in which the story, like in the “Choose your own adventure” books, branches out in several pathways). This pedagogical process allows the learners to put themselves in the shoes of characters by making choices leading them to different pathways – ideal to place users in concrete situations and test their abilities to act.

Like in movies, “Be the hero of your own learning adventure” courses don’t all have an urgent need for a MacGuffin. Some stories work without any screenplay artifice: countering a cyberattack, executing first aid techniques, etc. However, some other stories necessitate a narrative nudge to exist. In other words, the MacGuffin is used as a background to make the story more lively, immersive and ludic.

At Coorpacademy, we used this narrative tool to create a course on Design Thinking in co-edition with Fabernovel Insitute. The goal was for the learners to test their abilities in reproducing Design Thinking techniques. Previously, learners did a classic course on Design Thinking, learning the methodology – in this second course, they could apply them in concrete examples. In order to do so, we needed a pretext, un product or a service to rethink, for the learner to use Design Thinking methods in the shoes of a product manufacturer. We chose the umbrella – even if very useful as it is, this product can be improved. Here was a perfect MacGuffin: pretext to our story, interchangeable (Design Thinking methods stay the same whatever the frame is) and very forgettable as soon as we move forward into the learning twists and adventures.

As soon as we start working on conceiving a new “Be the hero of your own learning adventure” courses, we start thinking about a MacGuffin. For each new project, we collect empirical evidence helping us to sharpen the concept and make it more learning-friendly. We now know that a MacGuffin must incorporate 5 elements: tangible, universal, discrete and limited to a pretext role, non-technical and used daily. Choosing an object known of all, easy to apprehend, allows us to tackle any kind of topics, simple or complex, by rooting them in reality.

What about you? If you had one story to tell, a “Course in which you’re the hero” to create, what would be your MacGuffin?

Laurence is Learning Engagement Manager at Coorpacademy. She joined Coorpacademy more than 5 years ago and is now in charge of pedagogical innovation in the formats Coorpacademy proposes. What she likes the most in her job is to use creativity to innovate and to look for the most entertaining and engaging learning formats. For 2020, Coorpacademy is looking to create new forms of learning where entertainment is intertwined with pedagogy. That being said, we hope you liked the presentation of those “Be the hero of your own learning adventure” courses.

Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy, interviewed by Alexia Borg and Fanny Berthon at Learning Technologies Paris 2020

 

Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy, was interviewed by Alexia Borg, CEO of DLM News, and by Fanny Berthon, journalist at BFM Business, at Learning Technologies Paris 2020.

Discover his interview (in French, the transcript in English can be found just below the video) on companies’ transformations – plural transformations that can be digital, organizational, structural, cultural. 

Alexia Borg (DLM News): We’re live at Learning Technologies Paris 2020, and I’m with Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy. We’re going to talk about transformations. Hello Frédérick!

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Hello Alexia, hello Fanny !

Alexia Borg (DLM News): 4 years ago, you were amongst the first to speak about digital transformation and this is how Coorpacademy got recognized and well-known. What is your situation now?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Indeed, when we created the company, we we all coming from the digital world – my two business partners Arnauld Mitre and Jean-Marc Tassetto came from Google, and I was what you could call a serial web entrepreneur- and we created the first corporate digital learning platform. We investigated our market’s needs, which allowed us to develop our skill in content creation and our skill in technology. We chose to broadcast digital transformation content in an innovative, original manner, with flipped pedagogy, gaming, etc. which was pretty new back in the days. 

We’ve created the first corporate digital learning platform for the digital transformation of companies. And while we were doing this, or improving it, we realized that companies’ digital transformation was ongoing, and well advanced in some cases. Which meant that very basic kind of content, the acculturation type of content, like ‘How does Google make money?‘ or ‘When did the first iPhone come out?‘ – these topics of general knowledge – were becoming mastered and understood by corporations’ employees. Which also meant that these topics were now less important than more precise topics, such as data evangelization or cybersecurity risks. Companies were becoming more and more alert on these topics. Digital transformation was becoming more ‘expert’. Nowadays, digital transformation contents are looking towards improving the expertise of employees, and not simple acculturation contents anymore.

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): So we’re not looking at pure digital transformation only, we’re looking at more advanced training programs?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Exactly!

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): Towards management? Towards culture?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Indeed, since then, we’ve broaden our course catalog. Our mission today is to upskill the whole workforces of large corporations on all transformations that are at stake for companies. We all live in a world that is changing faster than ever, with a lot of speed, a lot of turbulences, and coworkers now need to adapt and to open their chakras on important matters. 

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): What are the companies asking for in priority? We talk a lot about soft skills in the upskilling process. Is this something you’re working on too? 

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy) : I think that in the end, the word ‘soft skills’ is a generic word, that can incorporate multiple topics. We have a catalog of 1,200 courses teaching soft skills. However, we categorize and editorialize them under the theme of companies’ transformations. Nowadays, digital is a soft skill. New management techniques, the lean management, agile methods, stress management, inclusion are soft skills. And for the company, it is becoming a true managerial transformation. Companies’ organization are changing. We observe cultural transformations too: working with international employees for example is becoming a major topic as we’re more and more in contact with the international business world. How do we work with Chinese people, with Romanians, with Indians? More than 40% of our platforms’ users out of our 800,000 learners are located outside Europe. Everyday, we see behavioral differences in companies, in the way people learn or interact with each other. To tackle cultural transformations, we have now in our catalog courses and content – co-edited with our partners – on how to write a good e-mail in English, for example, or on how to welcome and listen to an international coworker. These are soft skills too, but we call this the cultural transformation of companies. 

Alexia Borg (DLM News): Very interesting! Last year at the very same tradeshow, we spoke about Learning Experience Platforms. One year later, is it still relevant for you? 

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Actually, yes, we’re still there, it’s still an experience to play Coorpacademy, we do like to use to word ‘play’. It’s still an joyful experience to play Coorpacademy, as we have more than 80% learners who complete the modules they’ve started…

Alexia Borg (DLM News): This is huge!

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): We also have a lot of original content, co-edited and co-created with more than 50 partners, like IBM, Fabernovel, Forbes, Challenges – to name a few. The Learning Experience Platform part, if I may say, is to broadcast this content elegantly, efficiently, with a qualitative experience that makes you, me, anyone want to do more of it. We like to say that our content is backed by great user experiences, that is backed by great data which allow AI-powered or machine learning recommendations… But it has to come to one end: the learning, and the learner. We don’t want to create technology just for the sake of it. It has to be fueling the learning experience, the content. We don’t want to do new features just to do new features. In the past, we’ve ‘killed’ features which were not used, that we thought were good ideas internally – in some cases, data analysis told us they were not such great ideas for the learner. And in the end, all our work comes to the same end: the learner.   

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): So, yes to digitalization, yes to technologies, but not at the expense of the learner?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy) : We keep the user, the learner, at the center of all our thinking processes. The KPIs we observe the most are actually the engagement rate, the return rate, the Net Promoter Score… Those KPIs enlightening us on how people use the platform and especially on how people like it!

Alexia Borg (DLM News): Thanks a lot to making us go through those new transformations, Frédérick!

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Thank you!

Customer Success Manager at Coorpacademy: an octopus at the heart of business!

 

By Yaël Dahan, Customer Success Manager at Coorpacademy for 3 years. 

Because the job of CSM – Customer Success Manager – has the wind in its sails, and because it is particularly strategic here at Coorpacademy, I wanted to share which missions enliven us on a daily basis. It will allow the curious to better understand the job, and the ones who want to start a career in this extremely employable job to have a better view on what they would do.

It’s a reality: the CSM job is really sought-after in startups and also sometimes large corporations. Actually, any company with a large account in B2B [1] business model will need CSMs to take care and pamper the big clients.

A CSM, to do what?

In ‘Customer Success Manager’, there is Customer.

The Customer Success Manager manages a reduced portfolio of accounts with a ‘qualitative’ approach – on the contrary, Customer Support manages the masses with a ‘quantitative’ approach (users, learners in the case of Coorpacademy). In this particular case, clients are CAC40 companies and interlocutors are high-levels managers (C-level, like CHRO or CDO). The CSM’s goal in to ensure the clients are satisfied and to grow the revenue within the account portfolio.

To achieve this sales-oriented target, the CSM has a transverse job including different missions and a wide set of assignments. In a tech company like Coorpacademy, the stake is that the implementation and the use of the product are in line with the needs expressed by customers.

How does the CSM build a success story with the client?

In ‘Customer Success Manager’, there is Success. 

The biggest criteria of success is to position yourself as a client partner on a project with a strong strategic dimension. The implemented project must be completely integrated in a plan which brings together the maximum of involved parties and have a lot of visibility within the company. Every initiative putting the project in the spotlight bode well, for example:

  • Members of the top management speak in video interviews,
  • An ambassador program is implemented in order to multiply the impact of any communication
  • The project promotes the best learners or is part of an incentive plan…

And any other idea which creates a ‘Wow’ effet!

On the contrary, it’s not hard to notice it when the project is not considered as strategic for the company. I’ve seen newsletters listing, without any agencement or consideration – all HR initiatives conducted internally, where training platforms appeared like the umpteenth project drowning in a plethora of other projects, like ‘Never eat alone’ or the ‘Solidarity Rounding’. It’s not easy in that case to get noticed in the communication plan.

Once you became the partner of the client in a strategic project, the key to success is in the good management of the project (in Customer Success Manager, there is Manager). It starts with defining clear objectives and KPIs of success. Without objectives, how would you know if the target is reached or no? It may sounds obvious, but some projects start sometimes without any clear and defined targets. The whole thing becomes blurry, and it’s hard in that case to set up an action plan. It’s then the role of the CSM to force the discussion and make the client think of the ‘Why?’ Why this project? What is its goal?’ ‘Which need does it fulfill?’ With answers to these questions, the CSM will then have the opportunity to bring an action plan aligned with the goal of the project!

Through the project life, the CSM stays data-oriented to demonstrate the good use of the product and the alignment with the initial target. There’s no secret: a tool – if well used and not left in limbo – proves its value. Customers also like to do benchmarks: they like to see what their peers are doing in other companies and see which companies are doing better than them. If the CSM is good at what he does, he can find ‘good things’ and ‘less good things’ regarding the competition, to value the customer but also identify rooms for improvement (‘You’re very good here, but X is better than you there, they’ve implemented this with us, should we try to do something similar?’)

Furthermore, a CSM must be solution-oriented: never say ‘it’s not possible‘ but: ‘if I understand well, here’s your need, and I suggest we do this…’ You must be creative to always find solutions without creating as many tools as there are clients to maintain your business scalability. When the client asks features that are not in the internal roadmap, you must be firm. The CSM as a pedagogue can unveil the best arguments: what usually works is to inspire the client with a long term vision, which takes the project in the long time – strategic and visionary – and doesn’t need right now the very specific customization the client wants.

Finally, being one of the interfaces between the company’s internal and external world, the CSM has a pivot role which brings him to always work with the other departments in the startup. I’ve read one time the CSM was compared to an ‘octopus’ which always interacts with all the different teams. It’s an analogy that seems very appropriated to me!

Why is the CSM an internal octopus?

First of all, because the CSM has a lot of insights to bring to the Product Team. 

Because the CSM has a great comprehension of his clients’ stakes through daily interactions and analytical studies, the CSM has a pretty good knowledge of how the product is perceived by the client. The CSM is the one often reporting to the Product Team by doing a state of play on new expected features, frustrations or evolution needs. The stake for the CSM is to take a step back on what the client needs by evaluating the global value creation, hence questions like: ‘Are there other clients having the same feedback on the use of features? Would the evolution be relevant for other customers?’

Because the CSM needs the Marketing Team to collaborate on thought leadership missions.

The marketing is a key allied of sales teams and CSMs and it is for me a very strategical topic. It is thanks to an active collaboration with the marketing that the CSM can start the process of becoming the client partner. A lot of actions are possible: put the client’s story in the spotlight through interviews, business cases, integrate the customer to a Premium Club through regular inspiring and qualitative gatherings, or participate to the clients’ own events (Digital Days, seminars, conferences, etc.) Coorpacademy positions itself as a thought leader evolving in a rich ecosystem, with continuous sharing of relevant insights on the corporate digital learning market.

Once we’ve said all this, how can we describe the day of a CSM?

I don’t know if I can speak of ‘typical day’ regarding the variety of assignments. But if I try to sum up the time spent usually (there had to be numbers in this article) on a regular day, I’d say the CSM spends:

  • 35 of the time for customer relationship (follow-up meetings, steering committees, understanding the needs, identifying upsell opportunities, etc.)
  • 35% of the time for project management (software management, highlighting training programs and courses)
  • 20% of the time being the octopus, interfacing with other departments internally
  • 10% of the time for administrative work (CRM management, billing, etc.) – Not what we like the most, but it allows us to do good forecasts, so pretty useful 😉

What about the difficulties?

Monday morning, 8:10 AM, the phone rings, it’s your client, panicking: “There are errors 500 in production and we’re supposed to launch the new program this morning!”

The first difficulty for a CSM lies in the very nature of tech startups (bugs happen!) and particularly for SAAS (Subscription As A Service) products in which product evolutions and new features happen for each clients the same way. I’ve had to face exasperation from some clients (“I don’t want this course / I don’t want this new feature”). The key here is to react: I’m taking care of your issue as an urgent matter and see what can be done (50% of the issue is tackled when it’s prioritized). Then, a good organization with the Tech Team is essential.

The second difficulty is that there’s a real need to prioritize. We don’t get bored as a CSM! So we need to prioritize in terms of what brings rooms for opportunities and development. The CSM has something to say about the investment of his time regarding the customer level in the Customer Journey. For example, POCs (Proofs of Concept) or launch management is paramount and strategic: the CSM has to be very involved at the beginning because it is a critical phase on the long term. And this is very interesting too: launching new projects is a very exciting phase!

Finally – and it’s no groundbreaking news – we need to handle sometimes unhappy or demanding clients. The CSM learns how to manage complex situations, learns how to say no in a constructive manner: the CSM will suggests solutions or will explain the vision of the startup to send messages. It’s not easy everyday, but not the hardest, as there are on the other side very interesting discussions everyday – where everything goes well. And this is also a good thing: clients’ demands are a great strength to make the startup better, because they require the startup to take the good calls regarding the market and its evolution.

A few words to conclude:  

The job of CSM is strategic, employable, eclectic with numerous and various assignments and a strategic positioning. I think that a good product with a high quality accompaniment of the customer is the major asset for a startup on its way to success, and represent the condition for a premium service. The job actually got a lot more value in the past years, and evolved a lot since I joined Coorpacademy at the beginning of 2017. At that time, the CSM was mostly taking care of very operational missions (tool configuration for example, or support and creation of custom courses). Progressively and thanks to the creation of new jobs supporting the CSM, it became more of a Key Account Manager according to the current job definition on the work market.

Customer Success Manager: an octopus at the heart of business

 

I recommend this job to everyone who want to have a strong customer focus and a transverse job with high responsibilities. I’ve seen very beautiful projects, some ‘for the greater good’ with an impact on society; I’ve seen users that were fans of the product, thrilling and captivating talks, and the evolution of a job that keeps showing its value!

[1]Business to Business

Airbnb, spearheading the employee experience

 

This is an extract from the course The employee experience, co-edited with Clustree and available only on the Coorpacademy Learning Experience Platform.

The employee experience: everyone’s talking about it, but what does it mean? This new concept may appear quite complex, but it can also be seen in a very practical light: EX (the employee experience) covers every single interaction that an employee has with their work place throughout their career. In this course, you’ll discover more about EX and find out that it’s not just a passing fad. You’ll see that it’s a new and essential strategic approach that any business can adopt to attract and retain talent.

Airbnb, leading the way in quality employee experiences

One company that sets a good example when it comes to employee experience is Airbnb. And this is why!

Airbnb, spearheading the employee experience

When Mark Levy joined Airbnb as the Global Head of Employee Experience in 2013, the HR function was split into several different groups. The idea emerged to bring all these different groups together and create one team. However, Mark suggested going one step further. “If Airbnb had a Customer Experience Group, why not create an Employee Experience Group?” he said. In 2015, the Employee Experience team was created, effectively replacing HR.

An employee experience that’s in line with business values

Airbnb has constructed its entire business model around HR and the idea of feeling at home anywhere. Like Internet users, Airbnb’s 3000 employees function as a community. Each member of staff is considered to be both a customer and host. The idea is for the business to offer employees the same level of ergonomics and quality that it offers to its customers. The business hopes that in turn employees will listen more, and be more attentive to others. Airbnb core values are centered around benevolence, transparency, optimism and those values are also reflected in the employee experience.

The day-to-day employee experience

Airbnb has created a positive employee experience across all areas of their employees’ daily lives, especially at work. Goodbye to the classic open plan office. Employees were involved in the design of the office, which looks more like a home than a business. Airbnb also offers its employees flexible working arrangements and staff is divided into small teams, which flexibility and commercial agility are prime importance. The business makes sure staff has access to the latest, most ergonomic software.

Continuous training is central to the employee experience

Airbnb believes employees are there to grow. So for 3 months, employees can try out a new job in a relevant department, in a completely different Airbnb office anywhere in the world. Airbnb also regularly asks influencers to share their experiences with employees. Such influencers include Allison Johnson, former Vice-President of Marketing Communications at Apple, and Ambassadeur Henry A. Crumpton, a former member of the CIA.

A positive experience!

In 2016, a year after establishing their employee experience team, Airbnb took 1st place on Glassdoor’s ‘Best place to work’ list. And in 2017 it came 11th on LinkedIn’s list of ‘Top companies: Where the world wants to work now’.

What if you were offering your relatives a free access to a +1,000 course training catalogue?

 

In 2020, Coorpacademy unveils Friends & Family!

With this new year, we wanted to do things right and thank people who bring purpose to what we are doing everyday here at Coorpacademy: the learners on our digital learning platforms.

We thought a lot about the best way to do this. How to properly thank all learners with a very valuable gift? And we came up with an idea…

In 2020, we would like to offer learners’ relatives, friends, family members, an access to the whole Coorpacademy experience and its soft skills-oriented training catalogue.

So we’ve created a dedicated platform. Its name? Friends & Family.

You have access to a Coorpacademy-powered platform within your company? Perfect! This is for you!

It’s quite simple: each Coorpacademy learner has now 5 free access to give away to people of his/her choice!

How to do it? In 4 short steps, make your relatives enjoy this unique training opportunity:

  1. Go on https://www.coorpacademy.com/en/friends/
  2. Confirm your identity
  3. Send your 5 free invitations
  4. Your closed ones will receive instantly an email with a one year long-free access to Coorpacademy

That’s it! Your friends and family members will now have access to a course catalogue covering more than 90% of skills identified by the World Economic Forum as crucial for the next decade. They will be able to discover courses co-edited with Video Arts, Forbes, IBM or Challenges (more than 40 co-edition partners) on themes as varied as they are important for the years to come (blockchain, new ways of working, Corporate Social Responsibility, collaborative economy or new digital tools – for example).

You use a Coorpacademy-powered digital learning platform within your company? Contact us for more information!

And by the way, if you start liking too much the Battles and challenges on courses while you’re with your family, we’re not responsible of the atmosphere of your family gatherings 😉

Enjoy Learning… Together!

Entertain to learn or learn while being entertained? An article from Jean-Marc Tassetto in l’Agefi

 

Time is a scarce resource. Thin line between personal and professional lives, abundance of unsolicited notifications, limited attention span… According to a Josh Bersin for Deloitte study, which described a corporate learner today, ⅔ of respondents complain about not having enough time to do their jobs. From there, it seems a bit unreasonable to think that these will find and allocate some time to train in addition to their daily work…

Because it is massive, ubiquitous, fast to implement, digital learning can help. But it is not enough for you and me to train everyday assiduously. Engagement rates on digital learning platforms are historically low. Engage learners, maintain activity or high course completion rates as well as keeping a high user satisfaction – which can be monitored by the Net Promoter Score – are still big challenges. 

How do we raise then these indicators while keeping in mind that we lack time and that training is still usually something that is mandatory and enforced more than something we really want to do? To bring some elements to answer this question, let’s start from a simple factual observation: what do we regularly do when we have some time to spare? We watch a movie, a TV show or any other form of entertainment: in one word, we have fun!

Tackling the issue the right way

One way to tackle the lack of time issue while delivering training is to consider the Netflix, Disney, Fortnite side. The entertainment companies. To tackle the issue the right way: we don’t want to add fun, engaging and playful features to something boring but we want to start from an engaging format and add learning to it.

From Jean Piaget to Donald Winnicott, from Mélanie Klein to Anna Freud, psychoanalysts, psychologists and pedagogues acknowledge the importance and the impact of the game in learning processes. It seems obvious then that the entertainment field seems to be the right one – engaging, fun, ludic – for learning to be added to it. 

Did you like Bandersnatch, the Black Mirror interactive episode with multiple endings, available on Netflix? Using the same format, why not conceive a course taking a learner through a recruitment interview, where you can use different answers, with multiple endings, with alternative routes, while you actually learn how to conduct a business interview?

Are you playing Escape Games during your corporate events or with your friends? We have developed a digital Escape Game at Coorpacademy for a learner to know better the Coorpacademy platform and its content. And engagement rates showed it was a major success!

Avoiding the ‘pure game’ dimension

Entertainment creates habits, recommendation engines bring a communitarian dimension: it is very clear that the game – and it’s not new – is a very powerful ally to education. According to the study The Future of Entertainment from Havas x Cannes Lion published in May 2019, to the question “Which field should be improved by entertainment?”, 62% of respondents said ‘education’. And to the question “What should entertainment do?”, 88% of respondents answered ‘to educate and empower people’. 

In the end, we need to reapply the digital experience to what scientists and pedagogues know already – while avoiding the trap of going ‘full game’. Entertainment and learning can and should work together. So let’s dream of a course a learner will praise at the coffee machine in the morning, like this exciting movie he or she saw the day before…

This article from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, was originally published in French in the Swiss newspaper l’Agefi. If you want to read it in its original form, it’s here. 

At the EPFL Innovation Park, the interview of Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy

 

Discover the video interview of Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, on the advantages of being an EdTech startup at the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Innovation Park in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy : “Coorpacademy is what we call an EdTech start-up company, which brings together Education and Technology. We have a platform dedicated to Corporate Digital Learning. Coorpacademy’s Unique Selling Proposition is to deliver highly individualized learning experiences online. You and I being very different in the way we learn, we will be delivering through the same platform very specific content and instructional design pending to our upskilling and reskilling needs. 

Being located at the EPFL Innovation Park, for us, really made a difference. First of all, we’ve created Coorpacademy on the campus and decided to do so because we are close and connected to two laboratories led by Professor Pierre Dillenbourg, working on Learning as a Science. All this is related to artificial intelligence applied to education, deep learning and machine learning applied to education. So, for us, it is a key differentiator when it comes to delivering top-notch solutions to large multinational companies like we are doing; it is really great to be backed up by top-notch scientists.” 

We are proud at Coorpacademy to be part of such a thriving environment. Switzerland is a great place for innovation, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is one of Switzerland’s most prestigious schools, at the forefront of learning sciences and innovation applied to learning processes. This was, from the day Coorpacademy was created in 2013, the best possible place for us to thrive.

In 2019, figures show that Switzerland is still topping most global rankings on innovation. According to the World Economic Forum, Switzerland is the 3rd most innovative country in the world, only after Singapore (1st) and Luxembourg (2nd).

The article states: “The Center for Global Innovation Studies at Toyo University recently published a Global Innovation Index, ranking the innovation performance of each country. The index was created by selecting and integrating a total of 58 indexes for comparison from five main fields: international cooperation, market trends, technological innovation, resourcefulness and relevant policies.”

Switzerland is also the 1st country of world when it comes to government funding for university research as share of GDP, with 0,76% of total GDP being allocated to university research. It is quite impressive for the 5th most competitive economy in the world!

Coorpacademy has its roots at the heart of innovation and research in learning sciences, and we are proud to make the most of this thriving environment to deliver top individualized learning experiences to our customers.

E-learning: A simpler approach, please?

 

This article from Antoine Poincaré, Head of Sales at Coorpacademy, featured in Training Journal in the November edition – the UK’s most influential Learning & Development publication – argues the case for a fuss-free way to produce e-learning. 

Discover the article!

E-learning: A simpler approach, please?

Antoine Poincaré argues the case for a fuss-free way to produce e-learning.

The good news is that we all agree we’ve moved beyond SCORM in e-learning. The bad news is, have we really?

There’s no contradiction, because what’s happened is that SCORM was so dominant for such a long period that it’s very hard for the sector to shake off the paradigm. The issue is that its legacy is limiting the way we design content, and therefore is harming learners, as well as an important but neglected constituency – the e-learning designer. Let’s refresh our memory to see why.

SCORM stands for shareable content object reference model, and is a model that was all about creating units of online training material that could be shared across systems. 

SCORM defined how to create shareable content objects that could be reused in different systems and contexts and was a useful innovation.

The problem is that all these years later we have ended up with two major SCORM-related issues. First, it’s an old standard since its last official update was in 2004, so what it offers is not suitable for the way we work with content today.

The second problem is that along with the standard came software to build SCORM-aligned course content, which has been shaping the way we have been consuming e-learning ever since. 

The first feature developed with this software was the ‘import my PowerPoint deck’ tool and too much of the market never progressed any further. It’s easy to appreciate how this came to pass: PowerPoint is the norm in the classroom training context, so let’s apply what we know works here to the online setting when moving learning and development online.

Let’s get disruptive.

But when Elon Musk started PayPal, he didn’t approach NatWest and ask them how they would approach creating an online bank; he developed something disruptive and new. But that’s what we just don’t really do yet in the e-learning world.

In e-learning, we never progressed beyond the SCORM view of the world and that dominant PPT metaphor. As a result, we’ve had a full generation of training L&D professionals uploading PowerPoint decks into learning management systems and presenting that to group of learners. 

Fortunately, there was a step forward in 2013 when the global learning industry decided not everything has to be SCORM-compliant. At at once, great new Edtech start-ups came along promoting new, more stimulating delivery styles and UX, including mobile-first content. 

Unfortunately, along the way too many of the new players neglected that important constituency: the e-learning designers – who are now challenged to produce new and engaging content for these new platforms, but with tools that are almost antiquarian in look and feel. 

As a result, a huge question mark hangs over content creation and authoring; will it be easy to create and engaging enough?

At the same time, we are demanding these same content creators and authors improve their skillsets. The ideal list presented in the Learning & Performance Institute’s Capability Map which features 25 skills across five categories aimed at individuals and teams, and ranging in scope from strategy to learning facilitation. 

It’s hard to imagine how we can expect to add great user interface, design, composition, audio video, platform and art competencies, to name some of what makes great content that engage users. 

Today’s e-learning content creator demands more.

We need a solution that will help inspire and empower today’s e-learning content created. In effect, it’s high time a WordPress or a Wix emerged for learning content creation. After all, in the 2000s it became possible to build great websites with easy-to-use tools which allowed people to create them without the need to ever look at the Javascript and string exception handling that lay behind them.

Yet no equivalent revolution has taken place in the world of e-learning. Most e-learning designers are still stuck in the e-learning equivalent of that raw html hacking phase. E-learning designers need great, easy-to-use, drag and drop interfaces that hide technical complexity and promote creativity.

That way, they can devote their creative talents to developing the user interface, design, composition, audio video, platform and art skills with the best tools at their fingertips.

E-learning designers need great, easy-to-use, drag and drop interfaces that hide technical complexity and promote creativity.

After all, active learning is not the same as passive consumption of a PowerPoint slide or a 10-minute video. To truly engage, learning has to be structured, measured, involving. There must be useful, participative activities for the learner, and that activity has to be tracked and evaluated. You need to keep the learner motivated, supported, and on top of their own learning journey.

In addition, there must be ways to work and access the same content through multiple modes, from traditional study to something more playful. It should be consumable in multiple ways and times, solo or as a group activity. It has to be scalable and look great, but still track and provide quantifiable metrics that show the specific skills the learner is acquiring, or struggling to grasp.

Achieve design goals.

So, let’s get to a stage where there is a Wix to help designers achieve those instructional design goals. Workplace learning influencer Josh Bersin says in his 2019 analysis on HR tech trends: “While we’d all like to have a YouTube system at work, there are times when we need a [structured way] that steps you through an entire curriculum and actually delivers you at a point where you have truly learned a new body of knowledge.”

You can only achieve this via a learning platform that is entreprise-class, and data-based from end to end, and was designed to put the learner at the heart of every process. 

Noted senior learning transformation strategist Lori Niles-Hofmann recently stated: “Over time, we have expected the standard instructional designer to be both an expert in designing content as technically proficient in one or more rapid authoring tools. But I have rarely met anyone good at both – and the fact is, rapid authoring tools deliver the weirdest digital learning experience, unlike anything else online. 

“Likewise, you cannot get detailed analytics unless you know xAPI, which is again another coding skill. You have to know how to break Storyline 360 code and add xAPI, but I want an e-learning tool which is exactly like SquareSpace – but which can do quizzes! I want it to build digital experiences easily, and have the robust data behind it without me having to code one single thing.” 

Insightful remarks from commentators like Bersin and Niles-Hoffman help us the see what a ‘Wix for e-learning for learning content creation’ would look like. A few Edtech innovators and learning platform providers are designing solutions with the content creator and the learner simultaneously in view. We owe it to all the frustrated content builders out there to deliver on the experience promise for all our users. 

Antoine Poincaré, Head of Sales at Coorpacademy. 

Coorpacademy awarded as «SEF.HIGH-POTENTIAL» by the Swiss Economic Forum

Swiss Economic Forum’s experts recognise the great growth potential of Coorpacademy and have awarded the company the “SEF.High Potential SME” seal of quality.

The swiss Economic Forum awards the SEF.High-Potential quality label to SMEs with proven growth potential that is reviewed in a three-step process by an interdisciplinary team of entrepreneurs and other experts. The SEF qualification process is qualitatively demanding and certified by the SQS.

Full statement : http://www.sef4kmu.ch/en/success-stories/a-playful-route-to-transformation

3 questions to Jean-Marc Tassetto, Coorpacademy’s CEO & Co-Founder

How do you feel being rewarded? All the team is very happy about it. This is a great recognition that supports our ambition to become the strategic corporate digital learning partner of choice for large and medium companies in Switzerland and beyond. Among all our awards, this SEF.High-Potential SME label is a milestone achievement for us. Switzerland has already been named the most innovative country in the world and Coorpacademy is proud to thrive in this top-level ecosystem.

Is there already a gain for you out of the SEF4KMU process ? Any take-aways for you? The SEF4KMU process includes discussion with board of experienced entrepreneurs and domain experts. We received high valuable insights and feedbacks that confirm our profitable growth strategy. 

What are your main goals as a company and a team in the next 12 months while carrying the SEF4KMU Label? Any expectations at SEF? This award fits our ambition to become the thought leader of Digital Learning in Europe. We will continue to provide hyper-individualized corporate learning experience to boost learners engagement rates and deliver the company tagline: that users “Enjoy Learning!” thanks to our coming innovations.  Be part of the Swiss Economic Forum ecosystem is also a great networking opportunity for us.

 

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