Tag: learning

Training is a big deal!

 

Training is above all a human adventure. It puts people at the heart of the company and helps the talents that make up the company to progress. Through the story of my experience, I would like to try to answer the following question: does the size of the company count when it comes to training?

 

Having had the opportunity to work within groups of different sizes and operating in different sectors or regions, I have always noticed a common denominator in these experiences: my desire to learn. Whether it was learning how to produce an editorial calendar, something very concrete, or developing my adaptability, a so-called soft skill, the size of the company was never a hindrance to progress. But then, if size doesn’t matter, what’s left to measure? To help you understand, let me tell you the story of my rise in skills.

 

Here we are 3 years ago, I land in Montreal, and I discover the queue to enter the bus. If I decided to join Céline, it’s not for the love of poutine but for an internship in a big international cosmetics company. The dream – with 20 degrees less. With more than 8,500 employees, this first experience in marketing will allow me to develop skills that will be essential to me later on… Because in addition to the management and coordination tasks that I carry out on a daily basis – and which I quickly adopted the basics of – I am developing an unfailing ability to adapt without even noticing it. FYI, I work in French with Quebecers who work half the time in English. Since Canada is an English and French speaking country, all communications are done in both languages, but not all communications can be adapted to both languages. I adapt the speech, change the slogans, arrange the visuals. And when I get back to France, I feel like I’ve become a chameleon who can’t wait to change my appearance.

 

I’m back in France, I’ve just got a work-study contract to validate my last year of a Master’s degree in Communication, I’m starting in 2 days. The chameleon that I have become is not disappointed: I will now work in a telemedicine start-up! A dream come true – minus the Quebec accent. From my very first days, I’m learning new tools, adopting a new tone in my communications and immersing myself in new subjects. Offering teleconsultations and understanding the care pathway is a bit different than selling perfumes and understanding different skin types. And while I’m gaining skills in the Adobe suite, developing my creativity and gaining self-confidence, something happens that turns my life upside down: a certain extremely contagious and dangerous virus has appeared in the Wuhan region. You already know the rest: confinement, teleworking, Zoom aperitif and increased screen time. For my company, which has about forty employees, the adaptation is fast, and that’s good because we are at the front line. Although size doesn’t matter when it comes to training employees, it does influence the available manpower. This is why I had the opportunity during this pivotal period to provide support for tasks other than those usually assigned to me. This experience and this unprecedented situation allowed me to develop resilience and flexibility. But as I finish my work placement and head towards the world of work, I know that I will miss the school benches because I am thirsty to learn… Unless?

 

Unless the world of work is finally similar to the school benches. To finish our story, we are – almost – out of the health crisis and I finally found my first job as a Community Manager! The dream – minus the terraces. So I work in a start-up that does digital learning. A platform for massively developing the skills of employees, while meeting the needs of each learner. If joining a digital learning company makes it easier to increase your skills – I admit it – I discovered that, in the end, what I want to do later on is learn. Indeed, today I have understood that the common denominator of my employability, and above all of my motivation, is to progress, to improve myself, to adapt my skills to my environment. And as my environment is constantly changing, the chameleon that I am wants to learn continuously.

 

Thus, I have noticed through the writing of this article that all my experiences have led me to mobilise essential soft skills. Adaptation, resilience, creativity, team spirit, stress management, etc. are the soft skills that I have developed and nurtured throughout my professional life. The development of my skills is mainly based on my motivation and, to a certain extent, on the tools or situations that allow it. If the size of the company does not matter for my motivation to learn, the tools that will be made available to me can be influenced by this factor. In 2015, the inequality of opportunity in terms of training is reflected in the figures: the proportion of employees who received training in 2015 increases significantly with the size of the company employing them: 25% in the 10-19 employee group, 29% in the 20-49 group and 41% in the 50-249 group. These figures then increase to 58% above 250 employees, and to 63% above 500. Employees of large companies are therefore proportionally two and a half times more likely to have been trained in 2015.

 

This is why it is crucial that all companies, regardless of the number of employees, should be able to offer – and be offered – training that is engaging, impactful and accessible from anywhere. In conclusion, to train effectively, let’s not measure the size of the company, but rather measure the commitment of learners to develop their skills and the relevance of the devices put in place.

 

Are you a company with less than 250 employees and are you looking to develop your staff rapidly and massively? Discover Team by Coorpacademy, the training offer specially designed for start-ups and SMEs! Take advantage of a 15-day free trial – only available in French: https://coorpteam.coorpacademy.com  

Clue, the educational investigation: become the hero of your training!

 

Having just arrived on Skill Island, the seven members of the Newcleus research laboratory’s party committee soon lose one of their number in tragic circumstances. What happened to poor Mr Boddy? While everything seems to point to an accident, Colonel Mustard suspects… murder! He decides to investigate on the sly… Who could have had it in for the good man? With what weapon was he killed? And in which room of the house did the murder take place? These answers are up to you to find, thanks to the clues that have been misplaced in the sumptuous house. It’s up to you to play detective, it’s up to you to play…

 

Clue !  

 

With more than 150 million copies sold worldwide since 1950 – including 4 million in France – the mythical board game developed by Hasbro® has been invited onto the Coorpacademy platforms to make your employees the heroes of their training.

 

Discover this new educational format through 3 clues on the backstage of this partnership! 

 

Clue 1 – An iconic and entertaining partnership

 

Building on the success of the Trivial Pursuit courses, our partnership with Hasbro continues to enrich our training offer through the world-famous game Clue. Making learning more fun is one of our core beliefs and engaging employees in training is one of our daily missions. Therefore, we are constantly looking for innovative and entertaining formats, so that the learner is a real actor in the course they are playing.

 

With this new learning innovation, the learners of the Coorpacademy platforms have the opportunity to develop their skills through a game that they know well, and which mobilises their full attention! Indeed, a good detective must be critical…

 

Clue n°2 – A formative and playful investigation!

In Coorpacademy’s Clue investigation, your objective is to understand who is behind the murder of Mr Boddy… To solve this crime, you will have to discover as many clues as possible by exploring the manor and questioning the five suspects. But be careful… they will mislead you, knowingly or not! Your critical thinking skills will be essential to unravel the truth.

 

This skill, identified as indispensable by 2025 by the World Economic Forum, enables people to learn how to construct rigorous reasoning in order to achieve an objective, or to analyse facts in order to formulate a judgment.

 

Clue 3 – An immersive learning experience 

You are now in the shoes of the famous Colonel Mustard! You have access to the different rooms of the manor. These are full of clues that you can manipulate to gather all the information you need to solve your investigation. Pssst… the mansion is so big, it also hides secret passages. Pay attention, they might help you to identify the real culprit…

 

Set sail for Skill Island, a windy island, and find the seven members of the Newcleus research lab’s party committee! Hurry, one of them will soon disappear under strange circumstances… Start the investigation!

Traveling abroad builds soft skills

 

August is coming to an end and with it, the taste of vacation. This month, we’ve told you about the formative virtues of travel. In this article, we would like to refer to another type of travel – perhaps one of the most formative – to which we want to refer. Whether you are a student or an employee, it is often advisable to gain international experience. In fact, you may know someone who is preparing for an Erasmus exchange year for one of their children or someone who is moving to a country with a different time zone. But even if it is only for a short period of time, travelling abroad is extremely useful to develop your soft skills! 

 

Interacting better with colleagues

Communicating with people from different cultures can be difficult. In the world of work, corporate culture differs greatly from country to country, and if you want to successfully build relationships, work in different regions, or simply visit a subsidiary or colleague abroad, it is essential to be comfortable with cultural differences!

When you travel abroad, you are confronted with the unknown, both literally and figuratively. You discover the behaviors of a society that is different from the one you know, and you witness the customs that govern it. To interact smoothly with the inhabitants of this country, avoiding misunderstandings, you will identify the attitude, vocabulary and communication approach best suited to your interlocutor. This way, as soon as you return from your trip, you will be ready to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds.

To go further: Cross cultural communication

Training your memory

Going on a trip requires a lot of organization, and we often leave with several things in mind. Train tickets, check; hotel reservations, check; knowing how to say thank you in Italian, check; so much information that puts our memory to work, especially when we find ourselves in front of the waiter and end up stammering a timid “grazie”.

Thus, when we travel, we stimulate a specific part of our brain: the prefrontal lobe and more particularly the hippocampus, this part of the cortex which allows us to pass from a short-term memory to the long-term memory. The hippocampus receives all the information decoded in the different sensory areas of the cortex, and sends it back to where it came from. A sort of sorting center that compares new sensations with those already recorded. The hippocampus reinforces the links between the different characteristics of a thing, and by dint of repeating the links between these new elements, the cortex will have learned to link the different characteristics itself to make what we call a memory.

Thus, when you are traveling abroad, your hippocampus is strongly stimulated, which improves your ability to memorize information in the long term!

To go further: Boost your memory

 

Improve your English – if you’re not an native English speaker

Well, English is still the most widely spoken international language in the world, with 1.348 billion native and second language speakers. Mastering English is essential for professional success and for interacting in multicultural environments.

Going abroad means practicing your English – unless you are a language whiz and have mastered the national language of the country you are going to – and improving your speaking skills.  Speaking in a foreign language is not always easy. It can be stressful and impact the way you deliver information, describe a situation or express a feeling. In fact, travel allows you to confront this challenge and get used to speaking a language that you don’t practice often enough.

To go further: Holding a meeting in English

Coorpacademy promotes innovation and skills development within Swiss Life France

 

Our clients have training needs and our mission is to meet them. At SwissLife, the challenge of training is to give employees the opportunity to be more than ever a player in their professional lives and to encourage innovation by developing their skills, according to their choices, their needs and at their pace.

In order to achieve these objectives, Swiss Life and the company’s Training and Skills Development Department regularly enrich their catalog of learning offers with differentiating digital training. Today, the Training Department is integrating the Coorpacademy platform, in order to stimulate the curiosity of employees and their desire to learn!

We are very proud to be able to support the strategic objectives of the SwissLife group through 4 training courses on innovation and digital transformation, selected for the launch of the platform in mid-June 2021: “Entrepreneurial culture”, “Digital culture”, “Creativity and agility”, and “Anticipating change”.

Through our catalog of premium content, SwissLife employees will have the opportunity to develop their skills on strategic topics for the company such as cultural, digital, or sustainable transformation and to further develop a culture of innovation in line with the company’s purpose.

“The challenge is to allow everyone to live according to their own choices and our strategic objectives. To achieve this, we need to combine creativity, method and rigor. A combination of behaviors that we must adopt collectively.”
Eddie Abecassis, Director of Innovation at Swiss Life France

To know more about the role of Coorpacademy in innovation at SwissLife.

 

Digital transformation: what if it is not over? Discover the top 3 skills for a successful transition

 

Following the pandemic, one out of three companies in France stated that they increased their budget dedicated to digital transformation, according to a study released by Twilio on companies’ digital transformation and their customer engagement strategies. Affected by the COVID-19 crisis, digital transformation is now more than ever a priority for organizations if they want to develop serenely and be ready for the future, even more uncertain than today. Although it is not the only lever for organizations’ transformation, it has a lasting impact on behavior and shapes new processes, as it profoundly changes our habits.

Omnipresent both in our personal lives and in our professional environment, digital tools are growing at a rapid pace, sometimes much more rapidly than their uses. Here lies the complexity of digital transformation: how to integrate and adopt innovative but constantly evolving tools?

As the pandemic taught us, it is essential to prepare for major upheavals before they occur, so as not to be caught short. In 2025, a revolution will disrupt the job market. The digital aspect of companies will be decisive in the face of new challenges. Projections made by the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” 2020 report allow us to define which best practices to adopt and the skills to develop.

What is digital transformation in 2021?

Cloud, e-commerce, social networks, Zoom or data, blockchain, automation: you already know digital tools. Digital transformation is the process of integrating these technologies into all the company’s activities to improve its performance. Transitioning to digital also involves adaptation to new uses, for example, those of new consumers, which are rapidly developing.

Many think digital transformation resumes to implementing digital processes in the company, but how can we ensure they are understood and anchored in behaviors? Guiding the digital transformation is mainly leading the employees on the handling and understanding of these digital tools. Involving collaborators in change management and improving their ability to adapt is key for any major transformation to be successful. Indeed, when facing changes, agility and adaptation are fundamental qualities. This is where the HR function is decisive to drive their organization’s digital transformation.

How to become a digital employee?

The “Future of Jobs” 2020 edition report published by the World Economic Forum highlights this: the trend has been towards digitalization for several years and it is now a top priority for companies. The Twilio survey states that globally, 97% of business leaders believe the pandemic has sped up the digital transformation of their organization. It’s a fact: businesses are not done with digitalization.

The interest of companies to invest in data encryption recently emerged. Indeed, digitalization also comes with its risks, and preventing them is an essential step to complete this transition to digital tools.

The Future of Jobs report reveals a list of 10 key skills to develop for 2025, which you can find here. In this list, 3 skills are crucial for the digital transformation of organizations. As stated before, this transformation is essentially about the employees who compose it, or rather, their ability to adapt to it.

As the survey shows, companies plan to restructure their workforce in response to new technologies. What are the 3 key skills to guide the digital transformation of companies and employees?

N°1 Technology use, monitoring, and control

Digital tools can sometimes be complex to get used to, especially when they change our habits. The WEF survey results show that skill shortages in the local labor market and the inability to attract the right talents remain among the top barriers to technology adoption.

It is crucial to learn how to use new digital technologies and understand how they work, to earn their tangible benefits. Lacking this ability, the adoption of new technologies is slower, globally affecting the speed at which an organization transforms.

Some skills that come with digital transformation, often very technical, are so-called “hard skills” that require a computer or very specific, scientific knowledge. In concrete terms, if we all use and take advantage of the disposable technologies, then we are collectively developing towards a more digital and agile company. Training can also focus on soft skills, to promote agility and adaptation, and becoming more resilient while facing unexpected changes! As an example, cybersecurity, a digital challenge that concerns not only engineers, or big data, which is also part of the digital revolution, if the entire company knows how to benefit from it.

To better understand the scale of the digital revolution, learn to anticipate the tomorrow’s world :

Preparing for tomorrow’s world

Develop your agility:

Adopt an agile mindset

N° 2 Technology design and programming

The WEF report figures that executives face challenges while recruiting talent that specializes in AI, machine learning, software development, and applications. To enable a company to take full advantage of the potential that new technologies bring, we must set them up first.

By 2025, the digitalization of organizations will speed up and the availability of new digital tools will increase. To drive this transformation, technology design and programming skills will gain value. It’s mathematical. If you decide to use more tools, you also need to increase the number of people needed to implement them. And as technology expands and becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes more complex to design.

However, companies should not fall into the following trap: thinking that digital transformation solely relies on the recruitment of technology design and programming profiles. As previously mentioned, the real challenge lies in the general understanding of these technologies by all employees, to move towards a global, concrete, and collective change. To instill this idea of change, acculturation of the organization’s key players is the first step. Digital acculturation means understanding the issues it engenders and better transmitting them to all the collaborators. Beyond this first stage, digital dexterity plays a crucial role. It refers to the employees’ desire and ability to take on existing and emerging technologies to improve their performance. A collective attitude motivated by a genuine desire to understand makes all the difference as it allows employees to take the measure of the changes digital transition implies.

To start acculturation to digital tools:

AI and cognitive technologies

N°3 Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility

Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility are essential “soft” skills to help people understand new tools.

New technologies, and any change generally, can be perceived as an obstacle for employees. Therefore resilience, i.e. the ability of a person or a group to project themselves into the future and to evolve despite difficulties, is crucial to digital transformation. These difficulties are also a source of concern but will be easily overcome if employees learn to develop a good tolerance for stress and unexpected situations.

To develop resilience and succeed in overcoming individual or collective obstacles: 

Resilience

Digital learning, the primary tool for digital transformation?

Data from the report’s survey shows the importance of training to face the future of the job market. Indeed, mastering key competencies will allow collaborators to be more productive in the long term. To address this issue, employers investigate employees’ training, and it’s already going digital! The number of employers offering digital learning opportunities to their employees will increase fivefold by 2025, according to the survey. Although companies say that by then, the in-house department will deliver 39% of training, e-learning platforms will still supplement it for 16% of training. Digital training is therefore constantly growing and ensuring employees’ skills development.

The digital transformation of companies also involves the digitalization of training, accessible to as many people as possible, adapted to each, and engaging for all. To quote the economist Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chair of the WEF: “the same technological disruption that is transforming jobs can also provide the key to creating them – and help us gain new skills”. The tools are at our disposal, it’s just up to us to use them intelligently so we can unleash the human potential already present in our organizations.

Unlock the human potential of your business:

All courses

 

Audiolearning: a media that makes noise

 

Do you use voice messages instead of sending a text? You can’t live without Alexa, Siri, or another voice assistant? Indeed, our uses have changed since audio became part of our lives. To meet these new expectations, Coorpacademy investigated this popular format.

Learn how to provide an offer of engaging and efficient training podcasts and audio content! To better understand this phenomenon, discover our e-book on The rise of audiolearning, or learn about the key topics covered in this 2021 study through this article.

The podcast, a growing format

You can listen to it anywhere, whenever and it lasts an average of 25 minutes: the podcast. Born in the early 2000s, this downloadable digital audio content has experienced an exponential rise in recent years. With the use of cell phones and the unprecedented situation of lockdown, the audience today represents 90 million listeners per month. A trend that is not likely to decline: estimations project it will double by 2023. Investing in this medium becomes essential, as audio content is in demand and appreciated.

Learn by listening: it’s easy, engaging, and effective

Podcasts cover different uses: they can inform, entertain or immerse their audience in life stories. Yet, 74% of listeners want to learn new things quickly and screen-free! With an increase of 135,000 educational podcasts produced in 2020, this format is leading the way. Following the lockdown, audiolearning has taken off, and the offer is even wider! Lending itself to the art of storytelling, podcasts provide better memorization, and engagement rates are excellent: 93% of people listen to podcasts in their entirety or almost.

The multiplication of media allows us to solicit all of our senses and therefore to make our brain work! No scientific theory corroborates the popular misconception that everyone is rather “visual” or “auditory”. Sylvia Koenig, Director of Digital Learning at our partner Bookboon (world’s leading publisher of ebooks and audio learning for professionals) reminds us, audiolearning is like reading and it does not differ for the brain if the word is spoken or read.

What are the main audiolearning formats and their advantages?

Available in various formats such as interviews, talks, or stories, audiolearning is a fresh way of learning. Audiobooks are also flourishing and can be a real audio pleasure, even on “corporate” subjects! Beyond the diversity of formats audio content offers us, it has many advantages: easy to carry, you can listen to it at your own pace, and be able to multitask while listening. It satisfies listeners to be free of any screen, to learn informally, and find real flexibility to integrate learning moments into their busy schedule.

Download our e-book The rise of audiolearning to find a detailed typology of audio content, a podcasts’ selection dealing with major business transformations, a guide to best practices, and an overview of all opportunities offered by this format. Learn how to create and/or integrate an audiolearning offer for your training!

The Digital Learning Club to build the future of corporate digital learning together comes back in 2020 in a new format

 

Club: an organization of people with a common purpose or interest, who meet regularly and take part in shared activities.

Digital Learning Club: an organization of people with a common purpose – building the future of corporate learning, who meet at least once a year and take part in shared activities. Lifelong learning is the topic gathering them.

The future is uncertain. Especially during this global pandemic of Covid-19, especially at times when lots of places in Europe go into lockdown again. 

A few figures to realize how complex and uncertain the world of tomorrow will be: according to the World Economic Forum, in 2022. 75 million jobs will disappear when 133 million new jobs will be created. Also, in 2020, most of 2030 jobs actually don’t exist yet! Still according to the World Economic Forum, 65% of jobs in 2030 have not been invented yet.

Facing this uncertainty, one certainty: lifelong learning is key in order to remain competitive in a fast-changing world. And that lifelong learning idea, our clients understood it very well!

This is how and why the Digital Learning Club has been conceived. This event has been created for our clients, by our clients.

Every year, the Digital Learning Club is an event that our clients hold in high regard. They can share insights with their peers and co-imagine the future of digital learning.

Because it’s 2020, we had to come up with a new format. It will be online, for 45 minutes, and we will share with our clients the latest trends in training for 2021, the best practices to adopt, the pedagogical innovation with our R&D programs supported by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, our product roadmap but also what’s new in content production and editorial partnerships.

The Digital Learning Club is also a space for discussions and gathering: our clients will meet on November 26th at 14h00 to build together their Coorpacademy! If you’re interested in becoming a client of Coorpacademy and joining the Digital Learning Club, don’t hesitate to contact us!

With the Digital Learning Club, we want to build the future of Coorpacademy’s Learning Experience – which needs to be unique for each learner.

If you want to know more, contact us!

International partnership: Coorpacademy will distribute Cegos e-learning solutions in Europe [Press Release]

 

Cegos, a worldwide leader in learning & development, and Coorpacademy, a EdTech startup which deploys a digital learning platform adapted to the learners’ new uses, sign a distribution partnership agreement.

Through this new partnership, Coorpacademy customers will now have access to Cegos’ e-learning catalog on Soft Skills (in three different Html5 formats). This premium content will be available to Coorpacademy customers in France, Germany, Switzerland and in the UK.

Founded in 2013, Coorpacademy is a European EdTech startup specialized in innovative, scalable corporate digital learning solutions. Based in Paris and Lausanne, at the EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)’s campus, the company is at the heart of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology Research, partnering with EPFL’s Research Centers. Thanks to its digital Learning Experience Platform, Coorpacademy supports companies’ transformation and efficiency by engaging their employees, partners and clients in upskilling on any topic central to their competitiveness, thus reaching top quartile engagement rates. To unleash the desire to learn, Coorpacademy has developed a proprietary Saas platform delivering latest generation instructional design backed by Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Innovation labs, making corporate learning more fun, flexible and collaborative, truly centered on the end-user: the learner. Coorpacademy is part of the EdTech France association.

With its international culture and French origins, the Cegos Group is both a keen observer and a dedicated player in the world of work and business. The Cegos Group deploys a global offering, including turnkey and tailored training and development, operational consultancy, Digital Learning, Managed Training Services, international training projects, and certificate or diploma courses.

Running its own operations in 11 European, Asian and Latin American countries, Cegos is also active in over 50 countries through its network of partners and distributors, which are all leading e-learning solutions providers. Thanks to this network, its Catalogue on Soft Skills has 2.5 million learners per year.

Arnauld Mitre, co-founder of Coorpacademy, explains: “Since our creation in 2013, our vision of learning has been supported by outstanding, premium, unrivaled learning content and our ambition has been to offer the best possible learning experience to our learners. We have observed that our methods, from flipped learning to courses co-edited with top industry experts, showed high engagement rates amongst learners. We also thought that it was time for us to give our learners a pluralistic content offering in order to become a learning hub for top qualitative content. This is why we’re very proud to unveil this first partnership with Cegos, whose content catalog quality has been acknowledged worldwide and has won multiple awards. We’re thrilled to celebrate this major milestone in becoming a hub, allowing learners to find the best available content, with Cegos’ offer plus our existing catalog on learning soft skills.”

Pascal Debordes, Head of Channels and Alliances at Cegos Group, adds: “We are particularly proud to start this partnership with Coorpacademy. This fast-growing company and Cegos share the same learning & development conviction. Digital transformation and technological breakthroughs are revolutionising jobs and skills. The challenge is even more significant with the global health crisis we are facing, and which will have huge consequences on employment and organizations: millions of employees around the world will have to upgrade or refresh their skills through learning. More than ever, L&D has a crucial role to play. The power and the services provided by the Coorpacademy Learning Experience Platform (LXP) coupled with the innovation and the 18 languages of our Soft Skills catalogue is a premium answer to skills development challenges that companies need to address.”

If you want to discover more about the partnership, it’s here.

Digital Learning won’t wait any longer!

 

Discover this new article from Jean-Marc Tassetto, co-founder of Coorpacademy, on how digital learning won’t wait any longer. This article has been published in French in l’Agefi, a Swiss economic and financial newspaper: discover it in its original version here!

Digital Learning won’t wait any longer!

Digital learning allows people to train rapidly and at scale. However, in order to turn behavior from traditional training programs (slow but efficient in the long term) to fast and scalable programs, we need incentive – immediacy. In a report published in the early months of 2020, the World Economic Forum was already advising on the urgent need to upskill and reskill, and to train for tomorrow’s jobs. 

Technological evolution created an urgent need to accelerate companies’ transformations.  Not just digital transformation, but also organizational, social, managerial, and ecological.  However, although that urgency was present, it was not really tangible or driving behavior. In our daily professional lives, new digital tools have changed the way we work including new agile methods and redefined hierarchical structures, but learning and acquiring new skills took time. Back then, we had time.

A new emergency has now arisen, one with a barbaric name,  nanometric size and an exponential reproduction rate. Covid-19 has completely modified our behavior, personal as well as professional, and has created an even greater sense of uncertainty than the 4th industrial revolution and its technological evolutions. Overnight, as we all found ourselves confined, we had to use those new digital tools to communicate with our relatives and coworkers; to work remotely with efficiency.  We had to implement new agile project management methods to manage our teams remotely and to attend webinars instead of events. Microsoft has announced that all events this year will now be planned and conceptualized first as virtual events.  The huge expansion of applications like Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams demonstrates that the adoption process has been quick and brutal. At the end of 2019, Zoom had 10 million users. Today, they number more than 200 million!

We have been thrust into these new ways of operating. And the new ways require new skills. We need to acquire those skills quickly, then master and build upon our knowledge fast!  The next problem is that tomorrow is more uncertain than ever. Like all pandemics, the Covid-19 outbreak will end – but then what?  How then to learn quickly, rapidly, en masse, in order to meet this emergency while reducing uncertainty in the future?

Early March 2020 McKinsey studies show that almost 100% of face-to-face training has been cancelled or postponed until at least the beginning of July. But the end of face-to-face training can’t mean the end of learning. Technological evolutions won’t stop. New jobs will emerge, work methods will drastically change. Our workplaces, whether we are blue or white collar workers, will be transformed (we will take protective measures for months to come, our spaces will be rethought, the health of coworkers will be paramount). The sector that has had to go through these changes already and at speed is, obviously, the health sector.

When thousands of nurses, psychiatrists, surgeons, caregivers, pediatricians, midwives and others were called on to help in the battle against Covid-19, they had to uspkill or reskill to meet urgent respiratory crises, an area otherwise the domain of specialists.  They had to upskill, yes, but they had to do it fast, because the virus wasn’t going to wait.

On March 16th,  I sent a text to one of the Vice Presidents of AP-HP (Paris Hospitals) offering the Coorpacademy platform pro bono for the medical staff.  He responded in 7 minutes.  This showed me two things: first, the need for new skills was, for him, as important as the need for masks, ICU beds and ventilators. Second, that scalable decisions could be taken very quickly. The day after that text, we had the platform ready. 10 days later, 20,000 caregivers and medical staff had been trained on it, with  70% of courses completed on mobile phones. This demonstrates the need to train flexibly in an emergency situation. We found extremely engaged behaviors with a strong motivation to upskill quickly.  This is where digital learning comes into its own. Digital learning makes it possible to learn rapidly, at scale, in changing and challenging situations, on any device, at any time of day.

We speak a lot about the world of tomorrow like we are currently in a pause, in a spatial and temporal bubble. My belief is that lifelong learning (through face-to-face training or via digital learning platforms) will allow anyone to upskill and expand one’s employability by accessing the best content at any time. Lifelong learning is an essential building block for the world of tomorrow.

Jean-Marc Tassetto.

To read this article in l’Agefi (in French), it’s here!

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