Restaurants and retail are not the only sectors to have been hit hard by the health crisis and to have had to accelerate their digitalisation. The field of professional training has also been affected.
“The last few months have been difficult: the Covid years have caused a massive adoption of online training, we quadrupled our sales between 2019 and the start of 2022, and had to recruit a lot of new employees”, testifies on LinkedIn Pierre Dubuc, co-founder and CEO of OpenClassrooms.
Slowdown in growth in 2022
However, the dynamic is no longer the same. The manager evokes a “return to normal post-Covid” and a “slowdown in growth in 202nd.” Even if he assures that the company is solid, it must nevertheless cut in its workforce.
No redundancies however, but a voluntary departure plan. This program aims to support the departure of a quarter of OpenClassrooms employees. At the end of 2022, edtech had 535 employees according to Les Echos.
Despite this major first in the company, Pierre Dubuc wants to be confident and stresses in particular that “OpenClassrooms, like all edtech companies, had to adapt to a new situation.”
He also claims a future that “looks auspicious”, with digitalization that will increase, student applications “on the rise” and the return of growth. To demonstrate its solidity, the boss advances a positive balance sheet.
Courses that will integrate generative AI
Among these indicators, nearly “10,000 students on degree courses spread throughout France, and increasingly in the United Kingdom and the United States.” Last year, more than 44,000 people used its training paths.
In the comments, Pierre Dubuc also announces that a growing place will soon be given to generative AI, a source of “greater productivity”. But these uses require new skills.
“Learning to learn is more and more key, as well as skills to use AI well (“prompt skills”). We are creating a course on this subject and planning an update of our courses in the next few months,” he wrote.
The changes experienced by OpenClassrooms also illustrate the transformations undergone by professional training. The Covid has accelerated the deployment of digital academies in large groups.
Emerging digital academies
A multinational agrifood company with 330,000 employees worldwide, Nestlé equipped itself just before the pandemic with a training platform, the Nestlé People Academy. With the Covid, the share of digital training has increased from 40% to 80%.
To support these changes, the company had to help its trainers to adapt their training to the digital and remote format. E-learning is also changing training consumption habits.
And by generating usage data, these solutions are also key to adapting the offer. At Nestlé, the Academy thus makes it possible to adjust the need for training and to identify deficiencies in terms of skills within teams.
In 2021, the multinational was also conducting pilot projects around virtual reality training. These formats are already available at Alstom, which has its own internal digital university. The industrial philosophy on training: ATAWADAC (Any Time, AnyWhere, Any Device, Any Content).