July 2018 - Coorpacademy

Learner engagement: why any corporate learning has to have the learner at its centre

This piece has been written by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, and originally published on Training Zone. To read it in its original form, it’s here.

For too long, our business learning culture hasn’t really been working, but times are changing. Today’s always-on working environment requires a system with users at its heart.

The speed of technological disruption is accelerating and in our rapidly changing job market, with new job roles constantly emerging, we need to up-skill to survive, so training is crucial.

We demand it from our employers, but things are amiss with the whole corporate training model. A top down approach that is slow and inflexible secures user engagement levels as perilously low as 5 – 10%, and completion rates as low as 2 – 3%, which just won’t suffice.

This is mainly because it’s money down the drain. To translate these numbers into annual L&D budgets, that means that even the low number who agree to go on internal training courses, or download company supplied e-learning barely complete what the HR leadership thinks they should.

This is a serious waste of valuable corporate budget in unforgiving competitive times, which no CFO or CEO can be sanguine about.

We need training, as organisations. We need to get team members updated on vital new data protection (e.g. GDPR) legislation, changed health and safety regulations, equality and diversity initiatives, as well as task-oriented learning to help them do their jobs better, for example equipping the global sales team on the compelling new features of the latest release of our core product.

HR and training leaders need to place the learner’s experience back at the top of the priority list for any new learning project in order to bridge the gap.

To get corporate learning back to being a great and worthwhile investment, the picture needs to be flipped – urgently. We need a way to connect back with the learner and find a way to deliver what they want and need. We also need to rethink the way content is delivered.

We must ask ourselves if it is realistic to expect people who work remotely and anytime to stop everything and sit in front of a trainer droning on at them with a Powerpoint presentation and a laser pointer for eight solid hours.

Too much business training is the product of a learning culture that does not reflect the reality of work pressures and our daily digital lives, and how we want to learn.

It’s also a culture that assumes learners are passive objects that can just get shuffled in and out, uncomplainingly, of all those unexciting company training rooms.

The missing element

The siren of change is getting louder. According to the new Market Guide for Corporate Learning Suites from global analysts Gartner, HR and training leaders need to place the learner’s experience back at the top of the priority list for any new learning project in order to bridge the gap.

Gartner provides useful clues on how to do this by identifying a new corporate L&D aid plus new market segment – the Learning Experience Platform (LEP). This is an additional portal layer that expands the range of content and enhances learner engagement with training content.

LEPs are a class of HR support that include content creation and off-the-shelf content that are designed to improve the learner experience by embedding learning into daily activities or the applications on which staff spend the most time.

The next frontier in this user-centric business learning culture is the move towards adaptive learning, in which content and teaching frameworks are definitively customised to the individual.

What does this way of supporting training look like in practice? It’s actually pretty close to what you and I are already doing in our day-to-day lives – for a reason.

We live on our phones. We all try and make dead time waiting for a train or a phone call as useful as possible, looking for content – and we refuse to be delayed by a knowledge gap, turning to the internet to plug any lack of understanding when identified. To let off steam, we might play a mobile game for a minute or two.

Imagine training delivered that way – mobile, always available, in short episodes, and where appropriate, in a quiz or battle format for fun.

Need to know about Blockchain? You could send me on a two-day residential course once a year – or offer me a way to grab five to eight minutes of useful content, supported by video, when I have focus and want a bite-sized hit of learning then and there.

Asking the learner questions before any teaching takes place (the flipped pedagogy model) pinpoints their level and means they’ll be offered the lessons they actually need.

The picture I hope you see emerging is of a new, powerful and flexible learning culture to help the learners on the ground and day-by-day.

A user-centric culture

Finally, the next frontier in this user-centric business learning culture is the move towards adaptive learning, in which content and teaching frameworks are definitively customised to the individual.

We know Gartner have spotted a genuine change here, as we have seen it ourselves with our clients who use learner-centric LEP technology to do the very thing Gartner wants.

“We are witnessing growing buyer requirements for better personalisation, especially for learner recommendations and individual learner paths. In addition, with the improvements in mobile, video and collaborative capabilities, coupled with learner preference for ‘bite-sized’ learning, we’re seeing mounting demand for micro learning,” says the Gartner report.

The next step for any L&D leader who wants to help develop staff human potential, in order to up-skill and future-proof their workforce, is to complement their existing training support with the best of a customised LEP approach. It’s a great way to secure your competitive edge, and the very best of your staff.

Coorpacademy is now certified by the Learning & Performance Institute

Coorpacademy has just celebrated its 5th anniversary and we are delighted to announce our latest piece of good news regarding the UK market, only a few months after we settled down in London.

The UK’s leading authority on Learning & Development, the Learning & Performance Institute (LPI), has accredited Coorpacademy for its user-centric digital learning solution adopted by 700,000 learners worldwide and which integrates the latest innovations in online education. Users have access to a content library of over 750 courses, created through partnerships with 30 organisations (e.g. IBM, Euronews, Wolters Kluwer…) and delivered through 700 short videos and 6,000 questions, on any device, wherever and whenever they want.

According to the LPI’s report, Coorpacademy’s platform supports over 100 different businesses in sectors including luxury retail, automotive, food and beverages, transport and financial services and help them to be more effective and efficient by:

Transforming their organisation into a ‘learning organisation’

Developing their employee’s digital acculturation and soft skills

Boosting employee engagement rate up to 95% and employability through increased confidence on digital tools

Seamlessly integrating job specific training and on-boarding courses.

3 months after being referenced by global analyst firm Gartner as a Learning Experience Platform (LEP) in its Market Guide for Corporate Learning Suites, this new accreditation supports our ambition to become the strategic corporate digital learning partner of choice for medium and large, UK-based companies.

The UK learning and development market is undergoing momentous change away from structured learning programmes, towards open, ‘always on’, continuous learning cultures that better support the pace of change in work today. This is a critical period for technology companies like us and for organisations which understand the value that corporate training delivers to employees and teams alike.

Find out more about the Learning and Performance Institute here. Our profile will be shortly available on their website.

For more information on this accreditation and the associated key performance indicators, please contact us on [email protected] !

Gartner has identified the Learning Experience Platforms as a market segment in Corporate Learning Suites: what does this mean?

New learning models have emerged within organizations these past years thanks to the impulsion of a wider ecosystem dedicated to offer various and differentiating learning experiences to the end-user. The new Gartner Market Guide 2018 for Corporate Learning Suites reflects this new Corporate Learning Environment, where LEPs (Learning Experience Platforms) are now differentiated from the traditional LMSs (Learning Management Systems).

The Corporate Learning market is already a multi-billion market, and growing by the minute. Major players are merging, like when Degreed acquired Pathgather to become a leader in the Learning Experience Platform segment across the Atlantic. In May, Fuse Universal raised 20 million dollars to expand its learning system. Those are just a few examples. Everyday, players in this market are coming with new ways of learning, user-centric and aiming at protecting people’s employability in the future. And Coorpacademy in all that? We could see these M&As or fundraising as a threat, a rivalry… But this is not the case. We see that as a confirmation – now also confirmed by the leading research company in the world – of the need for companies all over the world to implement new, innovative, engaging learning systems. As a confirmation of our convictions. Companies all over the world have understood the need to invest in these Learning Experience Platforms to create value, train their assets, increase their training capabilities. To be, in the end, more competitive on their markets.

Is there a better way to explain what a Learning Experience Platform (LEP, or LXP) is than doing a short explanation course on our Learning Experience Platform? By clicking on this link, you’ll end up on a short series of questions helping you to understand what a LEP is and if you need one. All of that while getting a first glimpse of Coorpacademy’s Learning Experience. Test your knowledge on LEPs!

Our latest innovations, products or offerings, and our conviction for the past 5 years, illustrate this new market segment. With our micro-learning offering, learners can learn whenever they want in 5 minutes, not more, not less. Let’s say you have a meeting on GDPR in 5 minutes and you want to brush up your knowledge on it in a short span of time, it’s possible by doing a micro-learning course. Micro-learning adapts to the plurality of learners’ needs. If you want to get a glimpse of our micro-learning experience, you can check 5’Learning out, a 5 minute training nugget delivered directly in your mailbox every two days. With nano-learning (an even shorter span of time – down to one question), the learner can for example meet a specific learning objective with a chatbot asking him a question.

In order to create the most personalized and user-centric Learning Experience, we are data-driven – we will look beyond the classical KPIs such as completion rates to focus on behavioural data and study learners’ types and actions: is the learner curious? Performant? Does he or she come back often to play all new releases or does he or she want to focus on specific topics? All this data will help us create a Learning Experience that suits every needs.

Because, at the end of the day, learning must be an experience. An engaging one, a rewarding one, an unforgettable one.

We are glad we’re recognized as a Learning Experience Platform.

Computational Thinking Will Be Vital For The Future Job Market

This piece has been written by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, and originally published in Enterprise Times. To read it in its original form, it’s here!

Computational Thinking is running fast through every avenue of modern business. Jean-Marc Tassetto looks at why this skill is crucial in today’s increasingly data driven organisations

Computational Thinking (CT) is used in the design and analysis of problems and their associated solutions. It is rapidly establishing itself as the literacy of the 21^st Century as digital technologies become the core of the workplace.

Business is being disrupted, which will have a huge impact on the employment vista in the coming years, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2016 Future of Jobs report. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, 3D printing, nanotechnology and biotechnology, amongst others will change the face of the workplace as we know it. This will significantly affect job creation as well as job displacement. On average, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skills sets for the majority of occupations will be comprised of skills we do not consider crucial at present, according a WEF poll.

With a rapidly evolving job market it is paramount we prepare for future skills requirements and job content at individual, organisation and government levels. As advanced robotics, autonomous transport, AI and machine learning take over, future workforces will need to concentrate on so called ‘soft skills’ – in other words personal attributes such as persuasion, emotional and social intelligence.

Employee skill requirements are evolving

Skillsets will need to be in tune with the digital age. Not looking to address these issues over the coming years could result in large economic cost to businesses, according to the WEF. It isn’t just coding skills that organisations will need. Cloud, analytics, mobility, security, IoT and blockchain will all require the right skills to make them effective. Technical projects rarely happen in a vacuum, so non technical skills will also be important such as leadership, negotiation and communication, together with social and environmental responsibilities.

A learner-centric approach

In response, organisations must continually invest in training that will provide the right skills going forward – that means both technological advancement and soft skills. Training needs to reflect the way people now consume content. Instead of the marathon training sessions of the past, short bursts of training, as needed and always on, are the way forward. They also need to be made available on mobile devices so staff can learn on the move, where and when they want.

Gone are days of rigorous fixed hours, classroom style learning. Instead, to maximise learning and easily measure success, content needs to be placed online in an intuitive virtual learning environment. This way people can take responsibility for their own training and career development and are thoroughly engaged.

Not only computer scientists

And on course content, this is where CT comes in. CT isn’t just for computer scientists, it is a broad, structured way of looking at a problem. It is basically the approach we take when we consider how a computer can help us to solve complex problems. We aren’t just looking at what the computer does in terms of algorithms and abstractions, but also the various strategies that we can implement on digital systems. This involves breaking down problems into various parts as well as designing and using models and defining abstract concepts.

Even if a person doesn’t know how to program or code a computer – being able to think through a problem in a similar, logical manner and come up with a solution in the digital world is paramount. Designing a user journey for a retailer, for example, today requires breaking it down simple steps to put into algorithmic sequences.

Forward-thinking policymakers

CT is so important to enhancing efficiencies and innovation that governments have started to spotlight CT in their re-skilling roadmaps. In the US, the National Research Council, is ahead of the curve, working on CT for the past eight years. The Carnegie-Mellon University has a Microsoft-sponsored Center for Computational Thinking to advance computing research and computational thinking to improve society.

In Europe the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland has introduced CT modules. In addition, the Open University is also running introductions to CT, for example. The National University of Singapore has gone a step further and made CT compulsory, regardless of what course they are studying.

21st century business needs CT

CT will be core to future job opportunities. As technology becomes more sophisticated and pervasive we need to understand how to collect data, filter it. We also need to know where to find what we want and how we can use it in decision making. People need to be confident enough to face problems head on and have the ability to work out logical solutions. CT is the flexible tool that provides a consistent and straightforward problem solving technique.

Increasingly we are finding ourselves collaborating with technology. To ensure that people can deal with data in all its increasing complexity, it is imperative that organisations and their staff from the top down are au fait with CT if they are to flourish in the new age of digital intelligence.

This piece has been written by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, and originally published in Enterprise Times. To read it in its original form, it’s here!

Our digital courses catalog is going German!

Because Coorpacademy is born in Switzerland and that you were numerous to ask us, we would like to introduce the German language in our catalog!

To celebrate this, we’re happy to unveil the 15 first courses which can be followed entirely in German, and which represent 170 micro-learning modules! The 15 courses include “Coorpacademy Originals” and courses co-edited with expert partners (IBM, Usbek & Rica, Fabernovel Institute), from our 3 flagship collections: Digital Culture, Future of Work and Work Efficiency, in order to prepare well your organization’s digital transformation, upskill your coworkers and develop their employability. Here are the translated courses with a short description.

You’ve probably heard about blockchain, a technology that’s about to disrupt the world of finance, energy and many more. With this course co-edited with IBM, learn how it works, with the concepts of mining, smart contracts and consensus explained.

This technology’s potential brings enthusiasm in a lot of fields, from medicine to crypto-currencies. Discover in this course co-edited with IBM how blockchain can be applied.

Smart household appliances, vocal assistants, autonomous cars… Robots are everywhere! But who are they really? Discover them in this course co-edited with Usbek & Rica, a media which explores the future.

Social networks have changed the way we live and consume. But how to use them in the professional world? How can make your company visible on Facebook or LinkedIn? Discover how they work and learn how to use them efficiently in the professional world.

Smartphones are now in every steps of our consuming processes. How can you launch your company in the mobile world? With an application or a website? Discover that in this course!

For nowadays’ consumers, the buying experience must be the most continuous, and use various communication channels. Discover how to set up an omni-channel strategy.

All our actions, from sending an email to clicking on the Internet, create data. By analysing them, new jobs have been created: discover how Big Data changed a lot in our ways of doing things. — All our actions, from sending an email to clicking on the Internet, create data. By analyzing them, new jobs have been created: discover how Big Data changed a lot in our ways of doing things.

Minimum Viable Product, Minimum Lovable Product, lean startup… This concepts, coming from the startup world, are revealing a search for the best user experience possible: discover them!

It’s now rare to find someone who have not ordered one single product on the Internet, nowadays. But how to sell online? What are the future trends of e-commerce? Everything is in this course!

Discover in this Adaptive Learning course - a personalized learning methodology - if you’re ready to launch your online POS! — Discover in this Adaptive Learning course – a personalized learning methodology – if you’re ready to launch your online POS!

Have you heard of the Boolean search? Of the Quality Score? With this course, discover all you need to know about search engines, our entry doors on the Internet…

It’s pretty hard to avoid the video media in its professional communication. This course will give you keys on how to produce your own videos, choose your hosting platform or display them efficiently, and make them viral!

To favour emancipation and employees’ creativity, management goes further and further away from the basic coercitive one. In this course co-edited with the professor François Fourcade, discover a new model of management, innovative and collaborative. — To favor emancipation and employees’ creativity, management goes further and further away from the basic coercitive one. In this course co-edited with the professor François Fourcade, discover a new model of management, innovative and collaborative.

This Adaptive Learning course co-edited with Fabernovel Institute teaches you Design Thinking, which characteristic is the implication of the end-user. This course puts you in situation: become the hero!

“Liberated” companies, search for a purpose in coworkers’ missions, new digital tools: how to adapt to these transformations? This course co-edited with Management gives you the keys to adapt!

We wish you a great discovery of this catalog in German. Enjoy Learning! Gerne lernen!

How Thinking Like A Computer Will Help Save Our Jobs

This piece has been written by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, and originally published on minutehack.com. To read it in its original form, it’s here!

Historically, IT training has focused on coding skills. Now we need to think more like machines as well.

According to Mary Meeker’s much anticipated, just published 2018 technology predictions, you can expect the pace of the disruption of technology on the way we work to just accelerate – not slow down.

But does that mean fewer jobs, as so many fear – or a completely new set of career opportunities?

The evidence of history points to the latter, as the famous Internet trend analyst herself says: ”New technologies have created and displaced jobs historically… Will technology impact jobs differently this time? Perhaps, but it would be inconsistent with history, as new jobs and services plus efficiencies, plus growth typically are created around new technologies.”

And it’s true technology is disrupting the job market. As the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Future of Jobs report and a recent OECD study also found AI (Artificial Intelligence) in particular looks set to take over more and more tasks.

Some authors claim that only as little as 35% of current skills will still be relevant in five years – others say less, and it’s white collar jobs facing automation upheaval this time round, not just blue.

Step forward Computational Thinking

It seems we are on the cusp of a new automation age for sure. And as the robots move into our workplaces, our job roles will adapt – and with it, the skill sets to remain relevant. Everybody will need to have abilities complementary with digital technology.

But not everybody will be in need of hard programming skills: the future will require more than just being to code in Python or deal with malware.

This could mean skills associated with the Cloud, analytics, mobility, security, IoT and blockchain certainly, but there is a growing consensus that, as a culture, we have to introduce a computational/programming-like approach into all of our approaches to work.

This is being formalised around the movement around Computational Thinking (CT), where the focus is not just on the machine but on the human, whose thinking and learning is enhanced by the machine as job roles involve more and more working with computers.

Computational Thinking is basically the approach we take when we consider how a computer can help us to solve complex problems – i.e. algorithms, the way a Machine Learning program can learn from the data it gets, the limits of computation and so on.

But it also shapes what the person involved in the business process does, like preparing a relevant data set for that task, dividing a problem in useful chunks resolvable for a computer, detecting configurations where automation and parallelisation can be introduced, designing digitally, and so on.

What does this look like in the real world? Say you’ve agreed to meet your friends somewhere you’ve never been before. You would probably plan your route before you step out of your house. You might consider the routes available and which route is ‘best’ – this might be the route that is the shortest, the quickest, or the one, which goes past your favourite shop on the way.

You’d then follow the step-by-step directions to get there. In this case, the planning part is like computational thinking, and following the directions is like programming.

With this definition, it’s immediately clear Computational Thinking is not just for computer scientists. Being able to think through a problem in a similar, logical manner and come up with a solution in the digital world is what matters, and what we may all need, and as our professional lives become increasingly automated, CT related skills will grow in importance.

Whether it’s computational contracts, education analytics, computational agriculture or marketing automation, success is going to rely on being able to work fluently with IT, but always to have your eyes on the bigger picture.

Some forward-thinking policymakers are beginning to try and put this digital extension to traditional education on the horizon.

The US, for instance, is among the early adopters of CT, with its National Research Council and US tech university Carnegie-Mellon has its Microsoft-sponsored Center for Computational Thinking that provides seminars, workshops, research activities on computational thinking in any domain of life.

Leading European Higher Education institutions are following suit, like the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, which has been introducing dedicated CT lessons in all entry-level courses across all disciplines.

In the UK, the Open University is also running introductions to CT, while the National University of Singapore has made CT compulsory for higher education students, regardless of what course they are studying. Globally, Google is pushing hard for the democratisation of CT at early years to 12 education globally, providing a variety of teaching material to educators.

The call to action

But what should the world of business be doing about this huge momentous shift? How do firms incorporate CT approaches into their curricula to help their staff? What can we do to help employees successfully transition and acquire these new skills?

First, it’s absolutely key that you insist employees take time out for education and establish continuous learning programmes. To ensure success, you need to get away from the ‘top-down’ approach of old.

The old method of scheduling fixed hours for input needs to be discarded in favour of a learner-chosen model and a virtual learning environment in which all lessons and material are digital and available, 24×7 and increasingly via mobile and in short bursts.

In addition, incorporating gamification and collaboration features will increase employee engagement by activating the joy of competition and the desire for socialisation and exchange.

Employees are also time-poor and required to face rapid changes in their industries and jobs. What they learn must therefore meet their immediate needs and be adjustable to their level.

Asking them questions before any teaching takes place (the flipped pedagogy model) is a great way to pinpoint their level and means they’ll be offered the lessons they need. Finally, this is the foundation of a move towards adaptive learning, in which content and teaching frameworks are customised to the individual.

Such learner-centric approaches work, and can secure user engagement levels of more than 80%. One of our customers, Schneider Electric, places user centricity at the heart of its training efforts: “Individuals are able to self-pace their learning, and we are experimenting with mobile learning as the next frontier in this journey. Digital learning is now a way of life here.” None of this will succeed if employees don’t see the results for them.

According to a Gartner report published in May, “Place the learner’s experience and the solution’s usability at the top of the priority list for any new learning project.”

Training, be it CT-oriented or not, has to be about the learner experience, encouraging employees to develop all their skills to their full potential and to future-proof their careers – and employers need to offer skills like CT if they are to flourish, too.

Embracing a computational thinking mindset will prepare us to meet anything the digital world of the future can throw at us.

Jean-Marc Tassetto is the former CEO of Google France and co-founder of Coorpacademy, a growing force in the provision of user-centric corporate digital learning solutions.

To read this piece in its original form, it’s here!

Exclusive interview with Eric Pommat, Director of Development at DUNOD

Coorpacademy has started a partnership with les Editions DUNOD.

The famous French publishing house of the Hachette Livre group is – among other things – the 1st business publisher in France.

With strong brands like Mercator, Strategor, Communicator and iconic collections such as La Boîte à outils, les 5 Clés or 2h chrono, DUNOD just keeps on innovating.

From books to digital learning, DUNOD successfully accompanies all employees from any types of companies on their training needs, targeting operational topics but also soft skills (creativity, self-confidence, stress and time management…) with a proven pedagogical approach.

In co-edition with this partner, we just launched a first course on Mindfulness at work. 2 others courses are already scheduled: Boost your creativity with Mind-Mapping and Being efficient at work in the digital age!

To celebrate this new partnership, we sat down with Eric Pommat, Director of Development.

Dunod is a 2 centuries-old publishing house. How do you think books and digital learning can – and must – cohabit in the lifelong training of people?

Today, our books already coexist with digital learning. Just as they already coexist with their ebooks versions or the corporate training products ecosystem – they’re part of it – such as instructor-led training or news conferences, the galaxy of free products such as YouTube videos, blogs, MOOCs and social learning; you can also find in this ecosystem more innovating pedagogical formats like reversed tutoring, peer-to-peer or learning expeditions…

These offerings coexist because they meet different needs and different ways of consumption. It’s really good news for learners to access this diversity of formats, we’re happy about that.

At Dunod, beside the product, we’re interested in the ways of content consumption and use cases. They evolve in corporate training, because of the abilities offered by the digital era, of the training needs which changed – today, we must learn everyday – and they are being facilitated by the progressive evolution of the sector’s reglementation.

Today, there are as many use cases as there are individuals! We don’t see the digital learning emergence as a threat to books because they are two different ways of consumption. On the contrary, we’re seeing that as a nice opportunity of development, coherent and pretty obvious for a publishing house like us: digital learning is a sector very close to publishing. Way closer to publishing than instructor-led training, for example! We have content, a vast network of experts, etc.

With its books, Dunod was already a major player in distance training… 2 centuries ago!

Why partnering with Coorpacademy to make the knowledge from your books being transmitted in a different way? How do you think this digitalized and gamified diffusion will bring value to the content?

What we really liked about Coorpacademy, before all things, is the concept of the platform: a homogeneous and innovating pedagogical format (inspired by reversed pedagogy), but also engaging (short content, with granularity and gamification), in phase with the market.

Coorpacademy also carries a clear promise to the users and an important editorialization of content, which is rare in the digital learning sector – it is in phase with our publishing house DNA. They took strategic bias in which we find ourselves: seek for quality regarding content, pedagogy, or motion design videos, for example.

We found in the courses Dunod by Coorpacademy a new, original way to spread our content by meeting new use cases, targeting new learners and new markets: BtoB, the English-speaking world for example.

And we also want to believe in the “Netflix-like” platforms models. This is in phase with innovation and the announced reform of corporate training.

Yes, Coorpacademy is ticking a lot of boxes.

Our first course on Mindfulness at work has just been released. Among the topics studied in the course, there are the identification of our “attention thieves”, the deconnexion to find a better connexion to what matters, or exercises to reinforce his/her attention. Can you talk to us about this course?

To create the course “Mindfulness at work”, we used the expertise of Nathalie Va, Laethem, who published with Dunod the Toolbox of Minduflness.

We’re now facing what we could call the economy of attention. Especially in this digital era. As Tristan Harris, Google ex-product philosopher, said, “Technology is hijacking our minds”.

As Cal Newport said in his book Deep Work, we work in an era where our attention is sought-after by a gang of engineers working for companies having a lot of money. Our attention is now a scarce and valuable resource, hijacked by the Silicon Valley giants.

In our professional lives – and the border between personal and professional is more and more blurry – we go from reading our emails to a WhatsApp message, before checking the Twitter news feed, and then our Facebook notifications…

We’re “grasped” and we lose connection with ourselves.

Mindfulness is a secular technique of personal development, which allows us to stop the automatic pilot for one moment, focus on oneself, focus on the present moment: our emotions, sensations, thoughts, what we are doing and the situation itself.

Scientific studies show that mindfulness decrease the level of cortisol in the body, which is the stress hormone!

When you’re practicing mindfulness, you have less tensions and are more calm, you open your perception field and it allows you to be more comprehensive of you and others.

The goal of this course is to discover the benefits of mindfulness and to do the exercises instantly, like remembering oneself.

Thank you Eric!

Month: July 2018