Tag: leadership

Skills development: it’s time to revamp learning culture

 This piece by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy and former Google France CEO, has been published in Personnel Today. If you want to read it in its original form, it’s here! 

With PwC recently predicting that artificial intelligence will replace seven million jobs by 2037, employees need to learn new skills to reduce the risk of being displaced by new technology. But Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy and former Google France CEO, warns the UK’s current ways of developing employees’ skills are inadequate.

By now it should come as no surprise that employees in all sectors will soon need to work alongside technologies such as artificial intelligence, with many having to change jobs or reskill as technology develops.

But in order to equip employees with the skills needed to thrive, professionals in learning and development need to create a culture that delivers life-long learning at work. This is imperative for developing the skills organisations require now and in the future, and in attracting and retaining talent.

However, there is one problem – we’re not doing it.

Learning teams provide the resources, tools and time to support skills development – considering the career plans of staff, booking the armies of trainers and making hundreds of hours of relevant content available. But many are missing the needs of the recipient.

Traditional training culture seems to assume learners are passive objects that simply get shuffled in and out of training rooms. Yet for any training to succeed, it’s essential that employees buy into the concept and stop seeing training as something forced upon them.

Engagement is low

 

Corporate learning is currently in a state of crisis. According to research from Towards Maturity, 44% of L&D leaders report that staff are reluctant to engage with online learning. Engagement rates are perilously low – as little as 5-10% − and course completion rates can be as low as 2-3%, research by the University of Graz in Austria has found.

Translated into business reality, this means the small number of people who go on training courses or download company-mandated e-learning modules barely complete what HR and L&D teams think they do.

To stop corporate learning being a poor investment, this culture needs to change. In particular, if we are serious about our commitment to reskilling and upskilling workers to prepare them for the future, we need a way to connect with them as learners and find a better way to deliver what they want.

We also need to rethink the way content is delivered. We have to ask ourselves if it’s realistic to expect people to stop everything they’re doing and sit in front of a trainer with a PowerPoint presentation and a laser pointer for eight solid hours.

Plugging the gap between L&D and staff

 

But change is coming and a new generation of digital tools has emerged to plug the gap between L&D teams and the disengaged learner.

Global analyst Gartner found that “learning experience platforms”, which prioritise learners’ experiences and ease of use, will become invaluable as attitudes to learning change.

Training strategies should consider the reality of how people learn; content should always be available remotely – increasingly via mobile – and at the learner’s convenience in bite-sized chunks, making use of video, gamification and collaboration.

What does that look like in practice? Very much like what employees are already doing in their day-to-day lives. We live on our phones: making dead time waiting for a train or a phone call useful, turning to the internet to plug a lack of understanding, and playing a mobile game for a few minutes to let off a bit of steam.

“Training strategies should consider the reality of how people learn; content should always be available remotely”

Imagine if you delivered your training that way – mobile, always available, in short bursts, and, where appropriate, in a quiz format? Need to know about Blockchain? Employees could either be sent on a two-day residential course once a year, or offered a way to consume five to 10 minutes of useful, tailored content when they want or need it.

This is a new, powerful and flexible way for L&D teams to help learners to reach a certain level of knowledge day by day. These methods, alongside more traditional elements, can help develop a more user-centric learning culture.

Of course face-to-face training to hone certain practical skills is still part of that user-centric model. But a customised learning experience platform approach will mean employees are more likely to be thoroughly engaged in the training they need to keep pace with the changing world of work.

This piece by Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy and former Google France CEO, has been published in Personnel Today. If you want to read it in its original form, it’s here! 

Exclusive interview with Didier Noyé, expert in Management

 

I’ve just been named manager of a team, how am I supposed to do? What to do just before being in charge? How to drive the performance, but also the well-being and the cohesion of the team? How can I do to communicate well everyday, while knowing how to anticipate and handle the crispations that can occur? To become a manager is a job by itself, and it’s necessary to be prepared for it and to learn continuously.

Didier Noyé is a renowned specialist of change and skills management, and advises companies in their HR development. He published at the Éditions Eyrolles several books on communication and management. Through a partnership with the Éditions Eyrolles, Coorpacademy is about to launch a series of 6 courses, inspired from Didier Noyé’s books, which will come out during 3 months on a regular basis. To know everything on the basics of management.

On this occasion, we were lucky to sit down with Didier Noyé.

How did you, during the course of your career, feel the need to theorize management and to become an expert of it?

I wanted to specialize in this because I worked as a consultant for a lot of different companies, of different sizes and different fields of expertise. I then learned a lot about practical management thanks to very results-oriented experimentations. And I then got interested in research about management. How does an efficient team work? What are the reasons why employees commit – or not – to work? These are examples of research topics. I did then cross my experience in companies and my views on research topics.

We usually present the job of a manager as a job by itself, additional to the one the person is already doing. Do you agree? How would you define management in a few words?

Being a manager means bringing the team to a high level of performance, making it strive to do better. It’s a profoundly human job. You need to create the others’ engagement. Generally, where you’re named a manager for the first time, you’ve been named in a field where you’re already skilled, where you know the job. But sometimes, when you get to a second job as a manager, you can be transferred in a completely different field, where you don’t know a lot about the job in the first place. Which means that you’ll have to focus on the human aspects. And you need to give a complete human dimension to the job if you want to be a good manager.

According to you, what are the soft skills a manager needs to have to manage an efficient, performing team and where people are happy at what they’re doing?

I’ve taught two skills that I deem important.

First of all, listening (and empathy): it’s the keystone of leadership. You need to listen to people in order for them to listen to you.

The second one is positive thinking: what are the employee’s strengths? When you focus on strengths of people, and when you get people to use them, you create engagement. It’s contrary to the usual ways of doing and thinking. If your child tells you he or she had an A in English and a C in Mathematics, there are chances you’ll only focus on the C, inviting your kid to improve his or her level in Mathematics. In management, it’s the contrary: you highlight the qualities of people, and help them give their bests on their strengths. And their weaknesses? Use the strengths to fix problems. If your child has a bad grade in Mathematics, you’ll invite him or her to write an essay on Mathematics, in a very good English. Don’t focus first on difficulties; it’s counter-intuitive. You need to keep a positive thinking.

The first two courses co-edited with Eyrolles and Coorpacademy are released very soon. Can you talk to us about it?

First thing that stroke me was their length: they are short. And this is a real plus! Thanks to new web usages, learners like to focus on one precise topic meeting their needs, while going straight to the point. Content is clear, interesting and solid.

I particularly appreciated the different parts: key learning factors, the “did you know that?” section or the learner’s path to go from a chapter to another as soon as you answered correctly.  

What did you like in the creation of this collection “the Basics of Management” with Eyrolles and Coorpacademy?

I think it is an interesting formula. It makes you go straight to the point and allows learners to follow courses at their pace while choosing their points of interest. From the moment learners are acting in their own trainings, you must be able to answer their questions with multiple entry points. Moreover, there is a strong complementarity between e-learning and books. You can start learning about a topic thanks to e-learning and then go deeper in this subject with books. Or the opposite, according to what learners/Internet users want.

Thank you Didier!

 

Thanks to you!

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