content Archives - Page 5 of 5

The two-pager on Coorpacademy in the latest special issue of Capital Magazine

“Coorpacademy: the Netflix of knowledge. Say goodbye to boring training! This Franco-Swiss startup is revolutionizing corporate training by putting the user back at the center of a collaborative and playful experience.”

This is how the article from Benjamin Janssens starts in the latest special issue of Capital Magazine. By interviewing Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy, he showcases the stand-out factors of the platform, from ‘simplexity’ to the soft skills catalogue, from the ludic and addictive features to the engaging and individualized learning paths.

Discover this article (translated from French):

“When La Redoute definitely went from paper catalogue to focus solely on digital, they had to train their employees on digital culture and tools and on the latest trends of e-commerce. And what better way to do this than through proposing… online training! The retailer chose Coorpacademy to conceive a digital learning branded platform with tailored content meeting their needs. In 6 months, 800 employees were connected on the platform and – most notably – 88% of started courses got completed. Way faster and more efficient than the old ways – when face-to-face training were needed for each and everyone of the employees.

Moreover, traditional training usually focus on developing ‘hard skills’, technical skills, at the expense of ‘soft skills’, those more human and cross-sectional skills – the ones robots can’t acquire – which are more and more sought after by employers and recruiters. It is with the idea to fill that void that Jean-Marc Tassetto, Arnauld Mitre and Frédérick Bénichou, two former Google executives and one serial web entrepreneur, launched Coorpacademy in 2013. This Franco-Swiss startup, which won a lot of awards since then, started to put together a disruptive pedagogical method based on soft skills assimilation. The concept? ‘Simplexity’. Behind this portmanteau word is a very easy-to-use, ludic and engaging user interface, but giving access to targeted and relevant content.

“We’ve conceived a flexible tool which adapts to the user: our content pieces can be consumed everywhere at any time, in 20 minutes on average, or even in 5 minutes thanks to microlearning”, Frédérick Bénichou, one of the co-founders, says.

More specifically, how does it work? “We use the flipped pedagogy. The learner watches a 2 minute video or answers questions, and it is only just after that the learner will access to the pedagogical content. This content allows learners to either correct themselves, or go further, and the whole thing infuses a new dynamic to the learning process.

The success amongst employees can also be explained by the playful aspect of the platform: we score points at each levels, progressively. Numbers prove that offering gaming elements creates high engagement rates and a healthy competition between coworkers. “For a company, it is also a good way to find hidden talents within the company, people that will potentially turn very helpful for the company”, Frédérick Bénichou adds. At Pernod Ricard for example, the employee who had the best score on digital culture was a storekeeper in Cognac; his knowledge on the topic and the fact that his bosses realized this brought him to coach the Chief Marketing Officer.” While having fun, one develops his digital culture and his emotional intelligence with the possibility to challenge his peers or to be helped and coached by another learner within his organization.

So what’s the link with Netflix? Training modules, short and playful videos are all accessible anytime from any support (smartphone, tablet, computer). And thanks to machine learning, played content pieces help to recommend others – the startup created 27 distinct learners’ profiles.

After having tried at the beginning to target individuals, Coorpacademy revised its business model since then and only works in B2B for large accounts (Crédit agricole, Renault, Auchan, L’Oréal, Engie, Michelin…). Companies pay a subscription which allow their employees to access the training catalogue. Rates are decreasing depending on the number of users: from 9,90 euros a month for less than 100 employees to less than 7,90 euros from 300 employees, without any fixed-term appointment. It can be specific training content made for the company or the more general catalogue with soft skills oriented training – or a mix of both.

Coorpacademy recently implemented an internal control training program for Pernod Ricard, or a platform to make ‘La vie en bleu’ – a program around healthy good, health and wellbeing – known to all 350 000 employees at the Auchan Retail group. For soft skills training that are proposed to all companies, Coorpacademy is relying on a network of more than 40 partners and experts, including Capital and Management magazines, but also Dunod, Bescherelle, Video Arts, IBM. The website offers more than 1,000 videos and 8,000 questions (digital culture, management and leadership, future of work…) and covers more than 90% of soft skills identified by the World Economic Forum. A 10 million euros fundraising in 2016 allowed Coorpacademy to go abroad, by translating the training content in English.”

Benjamin Janssens

ROI of continuous training: HR Directors’ unsolvable problem?

For many years, calculating ROI (return on investment) of continuous training has been difficult, especially with the pressure of Direction Committees and stakeholders, with expenses sometimes hard to justify with actual and tangible results.

‘The main issue for Human Resources is the calculation of its return on investment.’ Catherine Benet, former HRD of Paris Airports (Aéroports de Paris).

How do we calculate the ROI of continuous training?

In the 50s, PHD and former president of the American Society for Training and Development Donald Kirkpatrick described an evaluation model of training efficiency in a 4 levels pyramid: The Four Levels of Training Evaluation. Jack Phillips then completed this model in the 90s in order to calculate ROI, with a 5th layer.

However and despite the evolution of HR practices over the years, the attendance sheet is – way too often – the method used to follow how people train and to see how many employees attended a course.

In this article, I’ll try to show you how asking yourself 12 questions can help nurturing the debate on the return on investment of continuous training. Food for thoughts and maybe a few leads to start calculating a tangible return on investment.

This is 7 minutes read. But there is a summary at the end of the page, for people in a rush 😉

Which ROI? For whom?

The 1st issue with return on investment comes from each and everyone’s expectations. When expectations are different, the calculation of ROI is different as well. Let’s take a few examples:

The stakeholder: ‘If I invest 1€ in training, I need to get 1€ + interests back.’

The senior executive: ‘To measure the return on investment, I need to see the training’s added value to business. How does it impact my business results?’

The HR Director: ‘In order to improve the return on investment of continuous training I can use digital learning tools. It’ll allow me to deploy our training content to the whole company very quickly, and to reduce face-to-face training times. My costs will be reduced, I’ll improve the return on investment.’

The Chief Learning Officer: ‘How can I measure my coworkers’ real learning impact? How can I measure with tangible results what they actually learnt?’

The managers: ‘Are these training programs concrete? My team doesn’t have any time to waste.’

The employees: ‘I hope the training content will be interesting.’

12 steps to calculate the ROI of training

In the end, the calculation of the ROI comes from a group of questions to be answered first.

These 12 questions aims at obtaining a positive and lasting return on investment with corporate continuous training.

How many employees like to train?
How many employees really train?
How many employees train with qualitative content?
How many employees remember what they learnt?
How many employees apply what they learnt in their day-to-day jobs?
How many employees are more efficient thanks to what they learnt?
On how many professional tasks are these employees more efficient?
How are these employees performing better?
Is the company seeing the result of this better performance thanks to tangible and measurable results?
Is these results important to senior executives and management?
Is the Direction Committee rewarding these results?
Is the reward valorized by the employee?

If you apply a conversion rate to each of these questions, you will obtain a ROI calculation and an estimate of this feedback loop efficiency. Obviously, the more your conversion rates will be high, the better will be your ROI.

Does this solve the main problem of HRs?

No.

The calculation is complex. These tasks cannot be completed by HR executives only. HR executives cannot impact all of these elements. Learning, learning tools, content, pedagogy, trainers, senior executives are also playing an important part in this cycle. We also know there will be loss at each step.

To illustrate what I’m saying, let’s say we apply a 70% conversion rate to each steps.

On the 70% of employees who like to train, 70% are actually training for real. 70% of those former 70% are training with qualitative content, 70% of those remember it… And so on – you get it!

At the end of the 10th question, it’s easy to understand how it is complicated for a HR Director to justify the return on investment of continuous training.. The direction will only look at the result in the end: here, it’s a 2,82% performance (70%^10).

How to maximize your impact as a HR Director?

On which key performance indicators do you have the most impact?

Basically, on the first 4 steps of this cycle: make people enjoy learning, make training more accessible, provide qualitative content and improve how people memorize and learn.

If – thanks to you – you achieve getting 75% people enjoying training and learning instead of 70%, with 75% of them actually and effectively training, with then 75% of them training with qualitative content and 75% of them – the ones who train with qualitative content – memorizing better, then your impact will almost be perceived as twice as better than previously: 4,96% of performance! This is the KPI the Direction Committee will study and see as important!

The 4 key steps

MAKE PEOPLE ENJOY LEARNING!

To transmit the will to learn to someone is often a balance between what’s mandatory to learn and the will to give knowledge as a trainer, whether the trainer is a parent, friend, teacher, manager, coworker of HR manager.

To say that a student or a coworker doesn’t want to learn is a mistake. Everybody enjoys learning, but not on all topics and not if the learning process is boring, annoying or sometimes humiliating. It’s normal that the school system or some training programs are disregarded because of these observations.

A very few of us wake up in the morning wishing to learn theories we won’t be able to apply in real life, for hours, before to be tested via a quiz that won’t explain the notions we might have not understood previously.

A good User Experience is the essential basis in any training programs, whether it is in face-to-face learning or e-learning. Do you want to learn in a freezing classroom with boring teachers? Do you want to learn on a e-learning platform full of bugs where you can easily get lost? NO.

To exit the scheme of traditional learning and understand what really drives learners, we need to understand the Facebook quiz scheme. Why does a Facebook quiz engage students more than a lecture course in a large classroom, on a topic students voluntarily chosen?

Answer: format and methodology.

When Facebook asks you 10 questions to see which country would be the most suitable for you, your brain understands it’s a game, without challenges, in which you will probably learn something. Used in pedagogical ends, reverse questioning can be very efficient.

We need to deeply change the way we see training, and the solution doesn’t lay in what we were used to at school. Gamification can bring us a part of the answer. If you’re skeptical about the benefits of gaming, I invite you to take a look at the proportions of video games players per age ranks in France in 2018. The good balance between the game aspects and the learning ones is still to be found though.

MAKE TRAINING MORE ACCESSIBLE!

When does someone want to train? The morning before going to work, or going to work? When facing a business challenge? During a meeting? In the evening? Between two meetings?

Like any desires, it can happen anytime! We’re not robots: the urge or the desire to learn something new can pretty much happen all the time.

What is fuelling this desire?

Sometimes it’s a life goal, sometimes it’s a weak stimulus, something that got you curious at the coffee machine: ‘Did you hear about the latest scandal of misappropriation of funds by top executives of this famous international bank?’

10 minutes after, you’ll probably be reading press articles about the case, on your laptop or your smartphone.

From the beginning of content conception, we need to think it – the training content – to be as accessible as possible, on any support, at any time, from wherever we are.

PROVIDE QUALITATIVE CONTENT!

Would you rather look for information yourself among thousands of possible results or receive the most accurate information, summarized?

Don’t make the mistake of seeking volume over quality. By doing this – volume over quality – you’ll reduce your coworkers’ engagement, lose their trust and it’ll be way more difficult to monitor their progress on a large volume of content. Without mentioning how difficult it would be to update all content pieces.

2 options are available if you’re looking for qualitative content: look for the experts in each skill fields or look for training players who chose the quality of content as the main part of their editorial lines.

In order to massively and internationally deploy your training programs, keep in mind that your main constraint will be the cost of deployment of your training courses. For this reason, digital learning is a very interesting tool to massively and instantly deploy your content all over the world, at reduced costs.

IMPROVE HOW PEOPLE MEMORIZE AND LEARN!

What are the best practices to memorize information?

Some use the ‘Method of loci‘ to improve memorization, others simply follow training programs.

To repeat several times is a well-known technique to improve memorization. Right now, the buzz word is blended learning: mixing training methods to repeat information while avoiding the monotony of repetitions. Blended learning became very popular among large corporations but might not be enough to ensure information retention.

Well-thought quizzes where each right answer can get you a bigger bonus of points than previously will motivate you to repeat your actions without feeling it is boring or annoying. It’s the art of gaming: making you better while having fun.

The challenges – ‘Battle’ on the Coorpacademy platform – between learners are a good example of efficient gamified repetitions, especially for people who like to challenge themselves and others. It particularly suits salespeople.

At last, pedagogy need to stay at the heart of the learning system. Forcing someone to learn doesn’t guarantee – at all – the memorization of information. Sometimes we think we know the topic already and we don’t want to go through the ‘learning step’ before answering questions and actually test our knowledge. Why then force a learner to watch a video, learning material before answering any question? The learner could simply answer, make a mistake, relearn, redo it a bit later. This counts already for 2 repetitions, while it’s not more expensive, and the key learning factors will probably be way more memorized by the learner than if he/she was working on a classical learning format (the course, then the questions, then the evaluation).

To improve information retention, memorization, one needs to master the art of repeating while making the experience pleasant and enjoyable for the learner.

To sum up…

The return on investment of training is still hard to measure. A lot of factors – and most of the times factors that you can’t impact as a HR leader – need to be taken into account. But it is possible – still as a HR leader – to impact positively the ROI.

At the Human Resources level, it’s by making people enjoy learning, making training more accessible, providing qualitative content and improving how people memorize and learn that you’ll increase significantly the impact of continuous training on teams’ performance.

A few ingredients are essential to a good learning process: desire, pedagogy, repetition, top-notch user experience.

For an efficient international deployment for organizations of +1000 employees, e-learning and more particularly Learning Experience Platforms (LEP/LXP) became the essential tool which guarantees instant deployment at reduced costs.

Continuous training is even more important today as new jobs are created and others disappear before we even invented the right training for them. Learning how to learn is becoming essential in order to maintain one’s future employability. Training on soft skills is becoming more and more important as studies from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey show it.

BONUS

Why companies serious about training need to embrace a new generation of e-learning tools? – An article of Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, published in Computer Business Review.

By the way, last but not least…

If you Googled the ‘Method of loci‘, you’re among the learners that are proactive in the way they learn. Congratulations!

If you haven’t but now want to Google it while reading this, it proves that it just takes a small stimulus to make people wanting to learn 😉

Why acquiring soft skills is not as hard as you think – an article from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, in RealBusiness

Coorpacademy’s Jean-Marc Tassetto outlines how to respond to new data on what skills are important in the workplace.

This new article written by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, has been published in Real Business, the content brand that tells the truth about SME life today for people starting, running and growing a small business.

To read it in its original version, it’s here. You can find here some extracts of the article:

“In its latest Annual Global Trends report, LinkedIn says it’s detected a real paradigm shift in what global recruiters are looking for in job candidates. The report, based on input from over 5,000 talent professionals across the globe, says soft skills like ‘creativity’ are increasingly sought after in today’s workplace.

Hard skills or soft skills for today’s era?

Hard skills are still highly sought after, such as competence in cloud computing. But as advancements in automation and AI change, the skills employers require is increasingly soft skills. In short, employers are recognising that computers can’t perform soft skills to the level that talented humans can. As the pace of business and automation speeds up, demand for employees to be able to think outside of the box, including their ability to work well with others is moving to the foreground. Skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration skills are what candidates need in the modern workplace.”

[…]

“Despite the increasing value of soft skills, the majority of companies lack any policy in this area. As a general rule, our work culture is not equipped to search for, grow or even accommodate these capacities. The critical question, then, is how will organisations adapt to acquire these increasingly desirable new capabilities?

Being a more flexible and adaptive working environment is the new way of doing business. We must take the right steps towards this shift. But most importantly, we need to accelerate their efforts to upskill and reskill. Plus we need to see a radical change in the way training is delivered.”

Make Skilling and Reskilling Engaging

However, acquiring soft skills is hard. Millennials especially, find traditional workplace PPT-driven instruction or traditional e-learning courses too uninspiring. Such indifference can turn your training budget into an expensive resource-wasting, tick-box exercise.

To get started, leaders should start using a new generation of digital tools. For example, the Learning Experience Platform (LXP or LEP), makes training relevant and exciting by putting the learner at the centre of the learning experience. Businesses need to re-think training. This includes getting people to really engage with it. This includes training content that’s diverse, interesting and easily accessible.

Gamification & Microlearning for Training

Firms should exploit the engagement potential of techniques like gamification, online competitions and learner quizzes. Neuroscience has shown us that playing stimulates curiosity and the desire to progress, as the term ‘play’ in the widest sense creates a positive, reinforcing learning experience.

Microlearning is a very powerful way to make this happen. This should be well integrated into the learning experience, as it allows the employee to directly look for the knowledge she really needs before a meeting. At the same time, the contribution of wider communities of learners should not be underestimated as the ability to interact and measure up to others increases learning capacity.”

[…]

“Training has a crucial role to play to skill and upskill your staff in new soft skills. Firms need to also pay heed to the learning experience in order that their staff genuinely acquire these new skills. Acquiring soft skills shouldn’t be hard – just use the tools out there to make it as easy as possible.”

Read the article in its original form here!

If you want to read other articles from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, it’s here:

Let’s start using a whole new class of meaningful HR KPIs – HRReview

How to Stop Worrying About a Jobless Future? – Bdaily Business News

Let’s welcome a new dawn of behavioural learning analytics – TrainingZone

“Had I not played Battles, I wouldn’t have been amongst the 4 laureates of the Paris Airports MOOC” – Discover Sory Fofana’s interview, the player of the millionth Battle on Coorpacademy

The MOOC Paris Airports laureates awards ceremony, organized by Tourism Academy, occured at the Maison de l’Environnement et du Développement Durable in Athis-Mons (France) on July 4th, 2019.

The MOOC Paris Airports is an online training platform powered by Coorpacademy which will allow this new learners promotion to specialize in airport services jobs, from welcoming tourists to airport security and assistance to people with reduced mobility.

We are proud to help creating jobs in what is the first showcase of France in the world with our pedagogical expertise.

Remise de Prix Tourism Academy MOOC Paris Aéroports

We also took this opportunity to interview Sory Fofana, who finished at the 4th spot of the MOOC and who played the millionth Battle on Coorpacademy!

He enjoyed his learning experience on the Paris Airports MOOC and now wants to keep training as an Hotel Assistant Manger. He started on Monday (08/07/19) to practice his new skills in a 3-stars hotel.

“The MOOC gave us great insights to propose a top-notch welcoming experience to tourists. I’ve never seen an online training platform as complete as this one, with as much learning content. It was completely new to me and really great!”

Sory Fofana, joueur de la millionième Battle sur Coorpacademy

What were you doing before taking this Paris Airports MOOC online training?

Before I took this training, I was doing an internship in order to become an Hotel Assistant Manager. I just finished the theoretical part of it. Now, I’ll start the put into practice part of it, on Monday, July 8th. For the next 4 months, I’ll apply what I learned in the theoretical part of the training.

You finished 4th in the Paris Airports MOOC, how did you achieve this great result?

It was a long challenge, and pretty difficult for me. How did I do it? I needed to earn points, especially with playing Battles one I had finished all training contents. Had I not played Battles, I wouldn’t have been amongst the 4 laureates of the Paris Airports MOOC.

What did you think of the online training platform?

I thought it was great. It was completely new to me, I’ve never found something similar to this. The website is great, the training content was very pedagogical and the more you finish modules, from Basic, Advanced and Coach, the more you want to learn the rest. The pedagogy is great, and it’s playful at the same time.

What did you think of the Battle mode?

When I had finished all courses, and after I got all badges and certificates, I received a Battle requests. I started to look into this. And I was like: “Let’s try this!” The more I received Battles requests, the more I played, and I told myself: “If I want to finish among the laureates, I need to challenge other learners and play Battles!”

What was your favorite course on the platform?

My favorite course was the one on Indians. I worked for more than 10 years in the hospitality field at AccorHôtels, and I was welcoming Indian customers. Indians can be complex customers, they have their own way of asking things and I needed to adapt every time to their culture, to their ways of thinking and to their ways of seeing things. This course really interested me in order for me to face any kind of situations with Indians. They’re very curious, and the more they ask questions, the more they show interest to our culture, to our ways of seeing things. Through this course and the Battles associated with it, I really understood how to welcome Indians when they visit France.

What do you want to do after?

Battles.

Congratulations on the millionth Battle played on the platform!

Thank you very much! It was a great experience, an enriching one. Thanks for all the work you’ve done for the platform to work seamlessly, I didn’t see any bugs. It was great overall!

Bravo!

Sory Fofana, joueur de la millionième Battle de l'ensemble des plateformes Coorpacademy

According to a study by City and Guilds Group, UK employees are bored with L&D… Pain point by pain point, discover what Coorpacademy does to make their learning experiences better!

According to the study Learning Insights 2019 by City & Guilds Group: ‘UK employees want their employers to provide a much more curated and tailored approach to training to better equip them with the skills needed for the future. They want to see more engaging (37%), personalised (35%) and better-quality (29%) content, as well as shorter micro-learning (23%) methods available at work.’

More engaging?

Why not try the ‘Battle’ mode on Coorpacademy?

In our Learning Report 2018, we identified a type of learners, the Players (the learners who played at least one Battle) and we realized that Players were more engaged and more efficient in training. The Players are 2x more present: the number of months that a learner is active on the platform during his/her whole learner life cycle is two times higher for Battle players than for non-players. The Players are also 3x more active, with more than 3x more lessons viewed. They also dive deeper into the content: they have started and completed 7 more modules on average than non-players. Finally, the Players are 13% more successful (success rate is measured as the completion rate of started modules) than non-Players.

By the way, did you know that our clients are also seeing the difference? In our latest interview with BNP Paribas Asset Management (they launched their Coorpacademy-powered platform Digit’Learning in May 2018), Sylvie Vazelle-Tenaud, Head of Marketing Europe for Individuals, Advisors and Online Banks, told us:

We present the platform as a tool for gaining expertise with a gaming aspect. In our communication, we mainly highlight the functionality of “lives”. We also highlight the fact they can earn stars. This functionality enables us to generate emulation between employees and make them want to take the courses again. Conversely, we didn’t communicate very much about battles but the employees discovered that functionality on their own and loved it! Coorpacademy offers flexibility in learning without being time-consuming, as the average duration of an entire learning journey is 20 minutes. Employees build their expertise in record time while having fun!

Indeed, more than 70,000 Battles have been launched on the BNP Paribas Asset Management platform in only one year. And the Battle mode is pretty successful on Coorpacademy, because we just reached 1 million Battles played on all Coorpacademy platforms!

UK employees want more personalised training content?

Our Behavioural analytics allow us to create 27 learners’ profiles, in order for everyone to have the most personalised and individualised course recommendations.

In one of his latest article published in TrainingZone, Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, takes the examples of the Curiosity or Perseverance Key Performance Indicators and how they can be of great help for learners (for their own individualised course recommendations), but also for L&D managers.

L&D managers and administrators benefit [from Behavioural Analytics] because they can access all sorts of new types of insight – not only finding out what someone successfully learned, but how the learner got there and which learning approach they chose.

This opens up tremendous diagnostic value, way beyond pure learning analytics. It also opens up the possibility for new performance indicators, such as curiosity, or perseverance – both hugely valuable HR metrics.

Take curiosity, identified as an “important variable for the prediction and explanation of work-related behavior” (Mussel, 2013). That is really critical, as motivation to engage in lifelong learning is a sine qua non of employability for today’s worker.

Notably, another important effect of curious collaborators is that they contribute to a company’s innovation potential, particularly in the light of the “death of top-down management” (cf. John Bell, 2013).

Employee learning perseverance is another potential new KPI example. When you next need to decide who to recruit to lead a project, or who to train, it may be useful to select those who are qualified but also the most resilient candidate (cf. Amy Ahearn, 2017).

Better-quality?

Our courses are co-edited with top experts, such as IBM, Video Arts, Wolters Kluwer, famous publishing houses…

Shorter?

All our courses are available in a microlearning format: 5 minutes, just the time you need to learn quick insights or refresh your memory on a topic, before an important meeting or when you flight is about to take off.

In his article 5 minutes to learn, Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, explains the concept of microlearning:

The content is divided into several shorter, more accessible sessions, with the creation of opportunities and contexts as a background. A session of microlearning should be seen as an opportunity to create special and useful “moments” for learning, particularly on mobile, while waiting for a meeting to start or a plane to take off. It’s during these moments that employees will want to integrate a few useful notions.

We launched “5 minute learning”: short content, editorialized and contextualized according to what’s going on and what our customers need, and delivered on mobile, which allows the creation of these short learning “moments”. All of this is supported by an engaging user experience.

5 minutes to learn – an article from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy

A study by Bersin by Deloitte paints the portrait of corporate learners today. Overworked: two thirds of them said they don’t have enough time to do their job. Impatient, too: they won’t spend more than 4 minutes on a video and have an attention span of 5 to 10 seconds on a website. Lastly, learners today are distracted, unlocking their smartphone up to 9 times an hour and logging online 27 times a day on average. The study also shows that employees are likely to be often interrupted by outside elements, such as virtual or real interactions, or even by themselves, while they are focused on a task. Sometimes, every 5 minutes. A short period of time.

Those 5 minutes are not a lot of time to complete a task, let alone receive training. And it is often difficult to devote entire days to training sessions. At the same time, a growing need can be observed among employees to take control of their training journey and develop skills progressively, on the topics they want and whenever they want. And Human Resources managers are becoming aware of this.

Coorpacademy, as a new player in the online training market, is trying to solve this equation through shorter training modules and sessions of “microlearning” and even “nanolearning”. The idea is simple: it’s a relevant answer to the chronic lack of time from the traditional corporate training model.

The content is divided into several shorter, more accessible sessions, with the creation of opportunities and contexts as a background. A session of microlearning should be seen as an opportunity to create special and useful “moments” for learning, particularly on mobile, while waiting for a meeting to start or a plane to take off. It’s during these moments that employees will want to integrate a few useful notions.

We launched “5 minute learning”: short content, editorialized and contextualized according to what’s going on and what our customers need, and delivered on mobile, which allows the creation of these short learning “moments”. All of this is supported by an engaging user experience.

Several studies have shown the efficiency of microlearning. An article in the International Journal of Educational Research Review states that a group following a “traditional” training program is less efficient than a group with the same content in a microlearning format (64% vs. 82%), and that microlearning can increase an individual’s learning capacities by 18% compared to traditional methods.

In order to create moments that are favorable for learning and thus transform the training process and make it a truly effective tool for the transformation of companies, a change in our ways of thinking is fundamental.

Heads of human resources and training, you should look at the training experience as a whole before you start scheduling training programs: every coworker must be able to manage their own learning time and pace.

Managers, you have a fundamental role to play: to accompany the training of your teams. Allow and encourage new ways of learning!

Finally, employees, don’t forget that for every moment spent in training, even if it’s only for a few minutes, you are developing your skills and knowledge, and therefore your current and future employability.

What’s next with the French publishing house Dunod? Interview of Éric Pommat, Digital and Business Development Director

At the beginning of 2018, when we started our collaboration with the French publishing house Éditions Dunod, we had the chance to meet Éric Pommat, Digital and Business Development Director of the famous French publishing house to celebrate the beginning of our content partnership (to read this interview, it’s here).

After the co-edition of 4 courses, it was the right moment to see what had been done, to talk about the next steps and to see how we envision the follow-up of this insightful collaboration.

In 2018, learners discovered mindfulness at work, a meditation technique which fits very well in the corporate world to increase one’s energy levels and avoid stress-inducing “attention thieves”. Learners also developed their creativity with mind mapping, a mental mapping technique to leverage ideas, generate more ideas and become more creative at work. Do you sometimes feel non-productive at work? Our Learners discovered 9 tools to work efficiently, including the Eisenhower matrix and the Getting Things Done methodology. And finally, in 2018, our learners (re)discovered inbound marketing and growth hacking, those cost-effective, efficient and fast-to-implement marketing techniques. 4 new skills, between soft skills and toolboxes to feel better at work and work smarter, that pleased Coorpacademy’s learners in 2018 (and viewing numbers prove it!)

Here we are with Éric Pommat for a new interview, to discuss prospections for 2019.

Hello Éric, thanks for meeting us again. First of all, what did you think of the co-edition process with Coorpacademy? How the publishing house Dunod ensures the communication with content creators and Coorpacademy’s instructional designers for the course conception runs smoothly?

The co-edition of the first 4 courses Dunod by Coorpacademy was flawless and efficient!

It’s important to note that Dunod is an atypical kind of partner for Coorpacademy. At the end of 2017, our publishing house – and it’s distinctive enough to highlight it – recruited its own team of instructional designers. Developing a new Digital Learning activity was indeed one of the major steps of our digital transformation.

Today, in addition to our legacy core work of publishing books, we want to put our editorial know-how, our pedagogical and digital expertise and the depth of content we have already to the benefit of companies and organisations. In order to advise them and to support them in their communication, custom edition and digital learning projects. Naturally, we’re on Datadock!

Those first courses have been created by our instructional designers, with experts on the topics and with the help of the instructional design team at Coorpacademy: everything was reunited to create engaging and attractive content for learners.

And a few months after our courses came out, the statistics speak for themselves: the Dunod by Coorpacademy courses are among the most played and appreciated on the Coorpacademy platforms.

How are topics selected for next courses?

We proceed in a “collective thinking way” by crossing propositions made by Dunod and Coorpacademy.

The Coorpacademy Team submits hot themes and topics among Coorpacademy’s customers or spots inspiring topics in the Dunod content catalogue.

On our side we use our editorial know-how, our experts network and our sales numbers to pick the most interesting and Coorpacademy-friendly matters.

After analyzing both insights, the collective intelligence of both teams then define the courses we’ll co-edit together!

What are the new courses to be released this year?

In 2019, we’ll be working on soft skills with 4 new essential themes:

1 hour to stop stressing and stay zen.
The best Lean tools for improving performance
Intrapreneurship and change makers
Learn how to learn

Are you noticing – in your day-to-day life – the importance soft skills are taking over hard skills?

Of course. The necessity to develop soft skills is becoming tangible everyday, in our jobs and day-to-day tasks. Sales techniques change, our readers’ ways of consuming content change, technology is becoming more and more important in our lives.

“…We’ve entered in the planned obsolescence of skills era (which have a life span between 6 months and 5 years)” as Jérémy Lamri says it very well in its latest book 21st Century Skills: how to make a difference? “The skill to learn how to learn new skills become the central skill for someone, to allow that person to maintain his or her skills portfolio, to keep improving and to save his or her adaptability, meaning in the end his or her employability.”

It’s becoming obvious: uncertainty lies with the future of the job market, with the game-changing technological innovations or with jobs creation. How do Dunod publications adapt to this fast-changing environment?

We learn and we try to reinvent ourselves everyday, supported by our triple expertise (editorial, pedagogical and digital) and our content catalogue (7,000 books written by 5,500 experts, enriched with 365 new books every year, both digital and paper).

Let me show you a few examples.

At the end of 2016, facing the structural decrease of our specialized markets, we started a transformation by creating a general public department at Dunod.

In 2017, we started to work on the digital learning market, first with soft skills programme (Stress Management/Self-confidence, Management, Time Management) developed for a group of private universities, and then with Coorpacademy.

In 2018, we launched an innovative online training tools for infancy professionals with the Pros of Infancy.

In 2019, we just launched the Dunod Atelier, a new B2B service of custom edition.

What is your favorite course co-edited with Coorpacademy? And why?

“Mindfulness at Work“, “Boost your Creativity with Mind-Mapping“, “Working efficiently: The 9 tools you need to know about“, “Inbound Marketing & Growth Hacking“, “1 hour to stop stressing and stay zen“, “The best Lean tools for improving performance”… and the list will grow bigger!

Each new course is our favorite. We are in a continuous improvement process, we learn and we do better each time. It’s very motivating. I can’t wait for the next course to come out!”

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.

Corporate training is dead, long live corporate training!

An article by Arnauld Mitre, co-founder of Coorpacademy.

Like all content industries since the advent of the web, the continuous training sector is mutating.

Let’s go back in time and recall what happened for movies and TV shows. Back in the day, it was possible to buy or rent a DVD shortly after a movie theater screening, or to patiently wait for it to be aired on television: that rhythm was imposed on viewers.

Continue reading “Corporate training is dead, long live corporate training!”

Tag: content