Tag: upskilling

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  

What skills should you develop as a Learning & Development professional?

 

To prepare employees for the world of tomorrow, the Coorpacademy team is always on the lookout for the latest skills to develop. In order to offer relevant training content, our teams are made up of diverse talents who are always highly motivated by the idea of transmitting. Because our objective is to meet the expectations of learners and make them want to learn, like all learning managers in the world, we mobilise certain skills in our teams to guarantee the best learning experience.

 

But what skills do our teams need to develop in order to best meet learners’ expectations?

 

Learning to learn

Our team of educational engineers is responsible for creating the courses in the Coorpacademy premium content catalogue. Therefore, our team has to learn continuously, to provide content adapted to each theme and to enrich the courses to be updated. By enriching their knowledge on a daily basis, our teams are also more aware of the specificities and constraints of effective learning, in order to propose the best pedagogy for the content in question. By improving our ability to learn, we also understand the mechanisms of learning. How is our brain predisposed to learn? What are the keys to successful learning? By developing this skill, our teams are ready to provide effective learning content that is tailored to the workings of the brain! Then… If we are not able to learn to learn as learning professionals, who will?

Go further by boosting your learning capacity with Sciences et Vie :

Boost Your Learning Abilities

Adaptation

Adaptation is a watchword within our teams, because learning is a challenge for every company, regardless of its size or sector of activity. Therefore, our teams cultivate their adaptability on a daily basis by working in collaboration with our clients’ business experts on the development of tailor-made courses. We make it a point of honour to adapt to each type of knowledge, each type of environment and each content objective. In addition, our courses are based on the principle of reversed pedagogy. This approach, which aims to engage our learners in their learning, requires our teams to be very adaptable, as we have to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who is new to a subject. When writing course questions, our teams make every effort to adapt the discourse to each target and each level of difficulty. Adapting also means having the ability to master several subjects at the same time. By working on both courses on digital culture in business and on themes related to cultural or ecological transformation, our teams develop an extraordinary level of adaptation.

 

Test your adaptability with the Coorpacademy test!

Test Your Adaptability

User orientation

Because as a Learning & Development professional we want to offer the best learning experience, we need to think about our content, and the way we deliver it, for the user. The learning experience is crucial to engaging learners and making training effective. So all of our teams are working to continually improve the UX (user experience) of our platforms and the way courses are delivered. And because we want our learners to have fun learning, we also develop pedagogical innovations such as the interactive series Suspects or the Cybercafé podcast series. The learning experience is then fun and engaging, so that the training has a real impact and our users integrate the training into their daily lives!

 

Learn all about user experience with the Coorpacademy course:

The user experience

 

Digital culture

In order to build the best online training experience, our teams develop a continuous digital culture. As well as being useful for using different digital tools on a daily basis, this skill is essential for developing your online reputation and communicating with as many people as possible. Therefore, we develop our digital dexterity on a daily basis, by developing our courses but also by talking to you on social networks! By the way, are you already following us on Linkedin?

 

Travel in a few clicks to the world of traffic generation levers in the digital era with the Coorpacademy course:

Marketing and online advertising

 

Finally, working as a Learning & Development professional means developing one’s own skills on an ongoing basis, to enable our learners’ skills to grow. And promoting a learning culture within companies means considering each learner, their expectations, their needs and their potential to transform the company.

Finally, discover the course co-published with Numa, ideal for creating conditions that help your employees to learn continuously:

The Learning Organization

Labour shortage: training as a crucial tool for recovery

As the economic recovery is confirmed, we are already witnessing the consequences of the pandemic on the labour market. Faced with the reopening, many companies are facing a shortage of skilled labour. According to the Dares, The French Directorate for Research, Studies and Statistics, although the job market has picked up again since the end of the health crisis, many positions remain vacant due to a lack of candidates. This problem therefore raises a training issue for organisations if they wish to participate in this revival of activity.

“Last year we provided 35,000 training courses. We would like to increase this year to 45,000 to help the working population find the right job.”

In response to the difficulties in finding workers, Frank Ribuot, President of Randstad France, explained in a BFM Business interview on 25 June 2021 that employers are forced to “recruit less experienced staff or staff from another sector“. Training is an essential pillar for overcoming this obstacle to recovery, as it will allow for the effective training of a workforce that may be less qualified, but which is ready to quickly upgrade its skills.

 

According to Alain Griset, Minister for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, “Labour shortages were the number one concern of entrepreneurs before the crisis – it is now the sustainability of their activity – and this issue is coming back strongly with the recovery of activity“. SMEs would therefore be even more affected by these difficulties. Nevertheless, all sectors are experiencing recruitment difficulties, particularly in the construction sector, in personal services such as cleaning or assistance to the elderly, in the digital sector and also in certain industrial sectors, according to François Asselin, President of the CPME, the Confederation of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. Thus, the construction trades (carpenters, roofers) and the health and social action trades (doctors, home helps, domestic helpers) are the trades most affected by the shortage, according to the Pôle Emploi “Labour Needs” Survey 2021.

Around the world, the phenomenon is becoming more pronounced. In early June in the United States, the US Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) warned that companies were struggling to hire enough people to meet demand.

“It is difficult for many companies to hire new workers, especially low hourly wage workers, drivers (…) and skilled sales people. The lack of job applicants has prevented some companies from increasing their production, sometimes even forcing them to reduce their opening hours.

In Germany, same observation. In a KfW Research study analysing the current skills shortage and how it could develop up to 2040, Dr Fritzi Köhler-Geib, Chief Economist of KfW Bankengruppe – one of the country’s top 15 banks – explains:

“The German economy can respond to the skills shortage and low productivity mainly through more investment, innovation, training and qualification measures. Our economy also needs these ingredients to overcome the coronavirus crisis and its consequences as quickly as possible. We therefore need a long-term growth and investment initiative from the public and private sectors for the coming years – not only in Germany but also in Europe. The main areas of action are crisis resilience, climate action and productivity growth through innovation and digitalisation.”

 

And in Quebec, the labour shortage is reaching new heights. According to Statistics Canada, the number of vacant positions in Quebec has increased by 18,500 (+14.4%) compared to a year earlier. One of the most affected sectors is the construction industry. Just over one-third (33.8%) of construction companies reported difficulty recruiting and retaining qualified employees, according to the Canadian Business Situation Survey. As a result, Quebec businesses continue to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and plan to invest in e-learning on an ongoing basis in the future, according to the Quebec Business Expectations Survey for the second quarter of 2021.

As we can see, the challenge of this recovery lies in increasing the skills and adaptability of companies and workers. It is clear that the available talent is scarce in most sectors. But this difficult period can also be an opportunity. The opportunity to invest in the development of skills, on an ongoing basis, to better deal with this problem in the future. Training is therefore a remedy for the shortage of skilled labour, and can also accompany the various transformations of companies at the same time. The challenge is to plan for the needs, to understand the issues and therefore to prepare for them. It is by identifying in advance the skills that will be crucial in the future that companies will be able to initiate change and face the next difficulties. It is therefore a real training strategy that organisations must put in place to promote the recovery of activity and overcome the current labour shortage. Human resources must initiate a real reflection on the talent available and the talent required, in order to put in place strategic training plans that meet the new needs: accessible at a distance, innovative and varied formats, features to engage learners and hold their attention, etc.

 

Labour shortages do not mean worker shortages. All employees are capable of upgrading their skills, learning, and evolving. What we are really witnessing is a shortage of qualified skills within the pool of potential workers. Of course, some will say that this is an optimistic way of looking at the problem. But we are convinced that it is by believing in the potential of workers and providing them with the tools for success that companies will be able to overcome all the current and future challenges.

A digital Escape Game to raise awareness of recruitment and integration of people with disabilities

SQLI, a European digital services group with 2200 employees, has been using Coorpacademy as a digital learning solution for 2 years. Within the framework of the workshops of our We Love Our Clients programme, Alexis Guillotin, Group Development and Training Manager, shared with us the backstage of the most original animation of 2020, aimed at learners and rewarded a few months ago by a Coorpacademy Award.

Q.1 : Where did the idea of offering a digital Escape Game on your online training platform come from?

We had the idea of taking advantage of the European Week for the Employment of People with Disabilities (EWPD) to raise awareness of the recruitment and integration of people with disabilities. This week took place last November and so our plans were disrupted because of the lockdown imposed at that time.

We had a double challenge. The first was to create an event for the whole group, simultaneously in several countries, several languages and which could be done at a distance!

There was also the question of the content, and how to disseminate it to raise awareness of disability. With this in mind, we chose our Coorpacademy digital learning platform Onegenius to reach all our employees. We worked on the content with the agency T by Talenteo, an agency that supports us on the subject of disability, and then, with the help of Coorpacademy, we decided to adapt it to integrate it into the Onegenius platform in order to benefit from its gamification aspect.

We had noticed the great success of a playful format among our teams: the digital Escape Game! It allows you to learn without realizing it, by solving puzzles to move to the next level! We therefore reused our existing initial content, but put it into this new format in order to raise awareness among our employees while keeping the gamification aspect.

Q.2: How did you go about setting up this Escape Game?

The Escape Game: Disability Awareness was created, translated and put online in a record time of one month. The idea was to make it clear how the five disabilities we had listed (essentially non-visible disabilities) impact the daily lives and therefore the work of the people concerned.

We decided to turn the tables: each level of the Escape Game takes the learner to a world where people with attention deficit disorder, autism or visual impairment are in the majority. It is up to the learner to adapt!

The pitch was as follows: “Travel aboard a ship in other dimensions where the disabilities you know are mostly shared. Practice with our simulation module to better understand the daily consequences of each of these disorders and diseases.”

Q.3: What communication actions did you carry out to promote this game event? Are you satisfied with the results?

We set up a very fast-paced communication campaign to ensure that as many employees as possible tried to solve the Escape Game and were effectively made aware of disability during this European week.

The first step was to send out a teaser by e-mail a week beforehand.

All the members of the CODIR participated in the promotion and were active relays.

Then, each day of the week, the learners were reminded by e-mail to invite them to travel to a new dimension, with five disabilities being covered. Finally, all the employees received a summary email containing all the stages and solutions to the riddles of this unique journey, so that everyone could finish or redo the game as they wished.

We are pleased with the results, as we observed a 280% increase in connections on the platform during the week of the animation.

And all the countries played the game! Beyond the figures, in this particular year, the Escape Game helped to unite the teams and encourage exchanges between them, as well as raising awareness about diversity and disabilities.

The Coorpacademy platform as a progression tool for employees: a Square Management success

 

Since 2019, we have been supporting Square Management‘s employees in training, in order to promote their upskilling on various subjects and their progression within the group.

Square Management met with one of the 3 co-founders of Coorpacademy, Arnauld Mitre, to discuss the benefits of this partnership. Back to this interview which describes the projects and successes of this partnership!

A continuously evolving collaboration

This partnership with Square Management began in early 2019. The platform was first made available within two of the group’s practices and then, as more and more employees showed their commitment to training on Coorpacademy, we expanded the partnership to the entire group practice in early 2020. To date, we have trained around 700 Square Management employees thanks to the Coorpacademy platform.

 

Why choose Coorpacademy as your online training solution? 

The need expressed by Square Management was clear. Training was a pillar to accompany the progression of the employees within the group and to enable them to increase their skills, improve their performance and guarantee their employability. Thus, several elements guided the choice of the consulting firm:

 

A catalog of premium content 

The off-the-shelf catalog that we offer contains premium contents, with courses created in collaboration with publishing partners and our team of educational engineers, and also the possibility of using an authoring tool in order to add their own content to the training catalog. Square Management also chose Coorpacademy to accompany the training of their employees because the consulting firm had a real need to train on specific subjects, such as management, leadership and other soft skills, which our catalog covers in depth.

 

Certifying courses, to validate the expertise of the consultants

Another success factor of the Coorpacademy platform within Square Management is the possibility to validate a range of courses corresponding to a field of excellence of the consulting firm. With this functionality, the consultants could concretely validate their acquired knowledge but also motivate themselves to complete the set of courses thanks to the delivery of a certificate once the set is completed. One of the success factors of the platform today is therefore the strong match between Coorpacademy and Square’s training teams, which gives employees the possibility to use the platform as a tool for their career progression.

 

Employees seduced by the platform gaming universe 

Another aspects that has generated so much enthusiasm for Coorpacademy is the significant attraction for the gaming universe that the platform offers and which is also possible thanks to our pedagogy. Indeed, the Square consultants particularly appreciate the video game inspired functionalities: the quiz format, the player’s life which designates the chance given to them to progress in the course, the battles between learners, etc. The consultants really played the game. This motivation is also rewarded, because we also have a feature that is obviously rather positive, where we present the 20 best participants on the platform. This motivates learners to go to the platform and challenge each other to commit to training.

 

Pedagogical innovations to encourage collaboration

At Coorpacademy, our objective is to release one pedagogical innovation per quarter. The latest one: the Escape Game “The Forum of Babel“. In this innovative format, learners will join forces to climb the four floors of the digital Tower of Babel. Each week, they are provided with documents and clues to solve a riddle. A Babel Forum is also available for peer-to-peer exchange. In this Escape Game, collaboration is key to finding the answers to the riddles. Employees had only one week to decipher each puzzle and reach the top of the tower! This format generated a lot of engagement among Square Management’s consultants, who won the collaboration award with the highest number of exchanges on the forums.

Previously, we also launched an interactive series, “Suspects“, where the goal was to help conduct three interrogations – one per episode – by applying behavioral skills, the famous soft skills. And most recently, we launched a podcast series called “Cybercafé“, to learn about the great history of the Web!

 

A final word 

The success of this collaboration would not have been as great without the involvement of Square Management’s training teams, with whom we are thrilled to keep this partnership going. We look forward to seeing the learners engage in their training and learn things! As Arnauld Mitre reminds us, at Coorpacademy, we believe that all means are good to learn something, even the most unusual ones, such as gaming.

 

Coorpacademy is integrated in Teams: when working, collaborating and training are done in the same place

We are witnessing the emergence of new, more ergonomic collaborative tools, designed to communicate in a faster and more organized way. Emails are less and less common and the expression “Slack me“, referring to the collaborative communication platform Slack, is starting to democratize, while in September 2019, the platform exceeded 12 million daily active users. These tools that streamline communication between teams and improve overall productivity are slowly replacing older, more segmented work tools. This is both a digital transformation, which favors the adoption of these digital tools, but it is also a generational transformation of collaboration methods at work. Employees will favor comprehensive, interconnected communication channels, or ecosystems such as Microsoft Teams, which facilitates teamwork and telecommuting by combining instant messaging, video conferencing, and file sharing on its eponymous collaborative platform. By 2020, the Teams platform exceeded 115 million daily active users.

Under pressure from the lockdown and generalization of remote working, companies are adapting and adopting these new tools that allow them to work together on files simultaneously, to organize meetings, conversations, and calls, in short, to collaborate – even remotely – from a single location, common to everyone. You might as well say that next to what these new tools allow, messaging services such as Outlook, almost look like fossils of professional communication. Today, we can have everything at hand on the same interface, designed to facilitate and streamline communication. It’s a natural progression, as the user experience on the platforms improves, the work tools also become easier to handle, and respond even more to the needs of a company.

But then, to truly meet all the needs of your employees and provide them with all the tools to improve their productivity, training must also be part of this ecosystem to naturally integrate into the employees’ workflow. Because a tool is useless if no one uses it, digital training solutions must be accessible directly on these new collaborative tools, because this is where employees are active, but it is also where they encounter the need for training. There is even a parallel between the evolution we are witnessing concerning our working methods, which are becoming more ergonomic, digital, and which respond to a set of needs thanks to the same global solution; and training, which is becoming digitalized, innovating to create formats adapted to the needs of the learners and offering contents with high added value in a single place. Our ambition at Coorpacademy is to make training accessible to all your collaborators and to meet them where they work. Thus, to make training accessible to all, the Coorpacademy platform is integrated into Teams! Indeed, on the Microsoft Teams platform, you can train in 1 click by integrating the Coorpacademy application, which will be accessible directly on your working environment once downloaded.

 

Work tools are becoming ecosystems and are more and more integrated, to guarantee a secure sharing of information within the whole organization and to promote collaboration. As we mentioned in our article “Learn and work at the same time or when training is just a click away“, training must be integrated into your organization’s productivity spaces, to allow your employees to have access in record time to a catalog of premium course content and thus immediately put into practice the knowledge acquired and optimize the retention of information.

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.

 

Manager of tomorrow: 3 skills to adapt to the managerial revolution

 

Companies are changing. Like the world around us, organizations are evolving and with it, the teams that make them up. To guide these transitions, managers are the ones who will take the first steps towards change. New work methods, project management, and new cultures require the adoption of a 3.0 management style that adapts to the new needs of employees, and also responds to the upcoming challenges. So how can we transform our management so that everyone invests in the common good and achieves their objectives?

There is no ideal organizational model. When we talk about transformation, we may tend to believe that there is an ideal to be reached and that it is enough to meet the challenges of major transformations for them to be “completed”. But in a world that is constantly and rapidly evolving, transformation is never finished, it is renewed.  Today, all major transformations ultimately depend on the ability of individuals and organizations to adapt, to evolve serenely in an uncertain world, and to react to the unexpected. Management is a pillar for supporting business transformations, because they are driven by teams. The challenge for management in 2021 is to guide change.

Towards a management 3.0

Companies are facing new challenges: hybridization of work, digital and cultural transformation, renewal of skills and talents, to only name a few. The context of the pandemic has transformed our management methods towards more agile methods and requiring more autonomy. Added to this is the arrival of the younger generations, called millennials, which implies, for example, a review of management methods. 

According to a study by the recruitment site Monster.fr carried out in 2020 with the Yougov institute, at the end of May 2020, 19% of 18-34 year olds said they did not need meaning in their jobs, whereas at the end of 2020, only 4% shared this view. 

In search of meaning, millenials are therefore no longer just looking for compensation, but rather a sense of purpose. It will be important for these new recruits to understand how, at their own level, they participate in the company’s collective adventure. These new generations of employees are also looking for feedback and encouragement. In exchange for their involvement, it is important to be thanked and congratulated regularly.

The term management 3.0 was coined by Jurgen Appelo, a writer and lecturer, who works on leadership issues. Today, a manager is a leader. This means that they use their power of conviction to lead people towards their objectives. This concept describes all the methods of agile management: the manager-leader gives meaning to the employees, rather than giving them directives. 

Management 3.0 would be an agile management type, based on a sharing contract. More linear, horizontal and collaborative, it would increase the autonomy of each person, and would be more empowering for employees. For the smooth running of organizations, it is essential for managers to develop certain skills, which will enable them to better understand the needs and expectations of employees, and to get closer to the role of coach. To do this, managers must learn to better manage their emotions, but also those of their teams. So, what skills should a manager develop today to reinvent his management and better support employees in the future?  

Management 3.0

Active listening

Knowing how to listen is an essential professional skill for any good manager. Sincerely listening to one’s employees has important consequences on the overall efficiency of the team, both individually and collectively, but also on the quality of inter-colleague relations. So what is active listening? First of all, it’s about clearing your head to make room only for the information that your interlocutor communicates to you. Without thinking about what you are going to answer, you let the other person finish what they are saying. To draw the best conclusions from what your interlocutor communicates, you should not think about what you are going to say next. You let the speaker finish what he or she is saying, and only decide what to think about it once it is over. You can ask questions, show that you are attentive and constructive to what the person you are talking to is telling you. By developing your listening skills, you will truly understand the needs of your teams, and be able to respond effectively to their expectations. 

Discover the course on Counselling

Managing conflicts at work 

Within the company, we are in daily contact with each other and this can lead to conflicts. Indeed, in all human groups, tensions can occur and it is up to the manager to take charge of these conflictual situations in order to transform them into an opportunity to improve relations. Because it is by building together that we reach a satisfactory solution, managing conflicts is a crucial aspect of management. Between conflicts of objectives; conflicts of strategy or methods; conflicts of interests or needs; and conflicts of values, dealing with these tense situations requires very specific listening skills, particularly in order to resolve them. Even if the conflict often appears in a brutal way, it almost always presents signals beforehand, which one must learn to identify in order to manage them as soon as possible. As a manager, you must not only learn to identify situations of tension – which can lead to a rupture – but also learn to prevent conflicts between employees by instilling the right practices and behaviors. 

Discover more on Managing conflicts at Work

Leadership

The company is first and foremost made up of people, each of whom will have different behaviors. The adoption of new processes and the smooth running of certain projects can be encouraged – or not – by the employees and their behaviors. Thus, the organization is influenced by the personalities that make it up, and the manager’s mission is to unite these pluralities of behaviors around the achievement of common objectives. To guide transformations, leadership is a key skill because it allows one to learn how to respond to the needs of individuals and to understand the behaviors of each person, in order to better guide them. Getting teams involved in projects and enabling them to achieve their objectives requires a climate of trust, which can be fostered by the social influence of the manager, who knows how to communicate with the various individuals who make up the company. To go from manager to leader, you don’t necessarily need to have a strong personality, but above all you need to be aware that leadership is about motivating people. 

Learn more on Evolving from manager to leader

Of course, there is no ideal organizational model. However, well-managed teams can make all the difference in creating the optimal conditions for collectively achieving business goals. According to a Gallup study, organizations that manage to personally involve employees in their missions achieve very good annual results. For example, a 10% improvement in the connection between employees and their organization’s mission or goal leads to an 8.1% decrease in turnover and a 4.4% increase in profitability. And finally, managers themselves want to be better trained to improve their job performance. According to a TalentSoft study, during the pandemic, 44.5% of public sector managers requested training for themselves, and that’s good! Managers, in their role as leaders, set an example and encourage employees to learn, so that they can continue to perform well in the long term, despite the unforeseen events that the future holds.

Learn and work at the same time or when training is just a click away

 

If like 91% of French and European HR managers, you consider skills development to be a strategic lever for the company, then this article should interest you. This figure is one of the four basic trends identified in the CEGOS 2020 European barometer “Transformation, skills and learning“, which questioned 1783 employees and 254 Human Resources Directors or Managers / Training Directors or Managers (HRD/HRM/HRM) all working in private sector companies with 50 employees or more. 

Businesses are facing new challenges, transformations of all kinds, tensions, uncertain futures, and to face this evolving context, the competencies’ development is a key subject that allows the growth of organizational and individual resilience within the company. In the same study, 88% of the companies surveyed adapted their training offer during the health crisis, and 75% of the levers activated by HRDs to face the impact of digital transformations were based on skills development.

To foster skills development, we need to focus on learning, which in turn relies on training that must be continuous, accessible, and above all, integrated with the applications and tools already existing in the organization. This is the new paradigm that is shaking up training and the HR function: Learning in the flow of work. 

Training integrated into employees’ work life

In his article “A New Paradigm For Corporate Training: Learning In The Flow of Work“, Josh Bersin describes this model for Deloitte. Companies are implementing solutions to support continuous learning, but the entry point to training is quick and easy access to the learning tool. As J. Bersin points out in his report for Deloitte, an employee will spend only 1% of a working day learning new skills. By integrating a training solution directly into the work tools, employees will be able to devote more time to their learning and thus develop their skills much more effectively. 

With a short format, personalized content, and a learner-centric learning experience, training is transformed. Learning in the flow of work allows you to learn whenever you need to, at any time of the day. It is when faced with a difficulty, being able to train in a few minutes to overcome this obstacle. You’ve probably already found yourself not knowing something, looking for the answer to a question you’re asking yourself, right? Your first reflex is to “Google” your question? This is already a first step towards Learning in the flow of work as you learn at the very moment you need it. 

With learning in the flow of work, you are only one click away from accessing training content, most often in the form of microlearning (course formats reduced to a few minutes). For example, on the Coorpacademy platform, our 5-minute learnings allow you to understand a subject very quickly and without interrupting your work. If you need to understand the stakes of 5G, what is SCRUM, or develop your agility in a few minutes, to meet an immediate need, learning in the flow of work is an adequate answer. Directly integrated into your organization’s productivity spaces, you can, in record time, immerse yourself in a subject that may have seemed complex at first. Learning while working also means better retention of information, because not only do we really need it when we learn it, but we also put into action what we have learned, in a short period. By making these tools available to employees, the company creates an agile culture and develops reflexes, so that training is a real tool for change. 

What revolutionizes learning in the flow of work is temporality. While traditional training requires the mobilization of a specific time, even when it is done remotely, this new paradigm revolutionizes our learning time by integrating it into our professional life. It all lies in its name: it is integrated into our workflow and becomes an integral part of the daily life of the employee, the learner, the individual in general, as they progress in their daily tasks. Training time adapts to the learner and not the other way around, the content comes directly to them, i.e. at work.

Learning in the flow of work also means promoting agility, an essential skill to develop in a constantly changing world. Better adapted to the challenges of tomorrow, but also employees’ needs, this model improves employee’s experience, who no longer perceives training as an imposed time, but rather as their initiative to nourish their curiosity and to upskill. By integrating training into employees’ workflows, we also make the learner an actor of their learning path. With more involved, engaged, and interested learners, the impact of training increases and influences employee satisfaction, and ultimately the overall productivity of the organization. 

In short, learning in the flow of work means integrating digital learning content and an engaging learning experience directly into the employee’s work environment. In other words, it means integrating the functionalities of a training platform into professional software, accessible to employees at any time. For training to become natural, access to online training must be simplified, allowing an increase in usage. Without interrupting the work in progress, learning in the workflow is a revolution that not only trains employees in the essential skills of tomorrow but also provides them with the skills they need for today. 

But then, how do you integrate learning into the employee’s work environment? Learning in the flow of work requires the integration of tools within human resources management information systems (HRIS) and software that accompany and manage the learning paths of employees, the LMS (Learning Management System). To find out more, don’t miss our next articles on how to make training just a click away.

New skills available on the Coorpacademy catalog!

 

Coorpacademy’s catalog is being renewed to better meet the training expectations of tomorrow. In a constantly evolving environment, it is necessary to know how to train continuously. To do so, it is crucial to identify the essential skills to be acquired. As mentioned in our article on the 10 key skills to be developed by 2025, identified by the World Economic Forum in its Future of Jobs 2020 report, training is essential to prepare companies and employees for the challenges that will disrupt them, and to anticipate the major transformations to come. While we already cover 100% of the skills identified by the World Economic Forum, we are investing in new skills for the future, such as sustainable thinking!

Therefore, we are glad to enrich our training catalog with 3 new skills. The ones that we, and the World Economic Forum, believe will shape the future of work in the years to come. In order to better accompany you in the training of your employees, in your upskilling or simply to feed your curiosity, discover the new skills to be developed on Coorpacademy:

Adaptability and Resilience

Showing adaptation and resilience is crucial in all circumstances. We can never say it enough, being prepared for the unexpected is essential to remain efficient and not to be destabilized by the obstacles we encounter. For companies, developing a culture of adaptability and resilience allows them to prepare for the unexpected, paradoxically. 2020 has shown that the unexpected is often confusing, which is why you should learn how to react to such situations, and do so before the next event.

Sustainable thinking 

The next (r)evolution will be ecological and to prepare for it, we are adding the competence entitled “sustainable thinking” in the Coorpacademy catalog. The ecological transformation of companies involves numerous stakes and the changes it implies must be thought sustainably, in order to conceive an organization that would take into account its whole ecosystem (economic, social and environmental) to build a sustainable model. To begin the acculturation to these vital subjects, we’re adding the sustainable thinking competence to the Coorpacademy catalog!

Learning to learn 

Because learning is not always easy, between notification and lack of concentration, we think it is important to go back to the basics: learning to learn. This is the theme of the new skill added to the Coorpacademy catalog. Rediscover the mechanism of your brain, to better understand the way it processes information and thus learn more efficiently. As we evolve in an uncertain world, learning to learn is essential to develop your adaptability and respond rapidly to the transformations of your profession. Become a learning ace with this new skill available on Coorpacademy! 

By enriching the Coorpacademy catalog with new skills, we enable companies to promote their transformation(s).  To ensure a successful digital transition, discover the 3 main skills to acquire:

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

To discover in detail the new skills available in the Coorpacademy catalog, click here.

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