Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy, interviewed by Alexia Borg and Fanny Berthon at Learning Technologies Paris 2020

 

Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy, was interviewed by Alexia Borg, CEO of DLM News, and by Fanny Berthon, journalist at BFM Business, at Learning Technologies Paris 2020.

Discover his interview (in French, the transcript in English can be found just below the video) on companies’ transformations – plural transformations that can be digital, organizational, structural, cultural. 

Alexia Borg (DLM News): We’re live at Learning Technologies Paris 2020, and I’m with Frédérick Bénichou, co-founder of Coorpacademy. We’re going to talk about transformations. Hello Frédérick!

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Hello Alexia, hello Fanny !

Alexia Borg (DLM News): 4 years ago, you were amongst the first to speak about digital transformation and this is how Coorpacademy got recognized and well-known. What is your situation now?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Indeed, when we created the company, we we all coming from the digital world – my two business partners Arnauld Mitre and Jean-Marc Tassetto came from Google, and I was what you could call a serial web entrepreneur- and we created the first corporate digital learning platform. We investigated our market’s needs, which allowed us to develop our skill in content creation and our skill in technology. We chose to broadcast digital transformation content in an innovative, original manner, with flipped pedagogy, gaming, etc. which was pretty new back in the days. 

We’ve created the first corporate digital learning platform for the digital transformation of companies. And while we were doing this, or improving it, we realized that companies’ digital transformation was ongoing, and well advanced in some cases. Which meant that very basic kind of content, the acculturation type of content, like ‘How does Google make money?‘ or ‘When did the first iPhone come out?‘ – these topics of general knowledge – were becoming mastered and understood by corporations’ employees. Which also meant that these topics were now less important than more precise topics, such as data evangelization or cybersecurity risks. Companies were becoming more and more alert on these topics. Digital transformation was becoming more ‘expert’. Nowadays, digital transformation contents are looking towards improving the expertise of employees, and not simple acculturation contents anymore.

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): So we’re not looking at pure digital transformation only, we’re looking at more advanced training programs?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Exactly!

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): Towards management? Towards culture?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Indeed, since then, we’ve broaden our course catalog. Our mission today is to upskill the whole workforces of large corporations on all transformations that are at stake for companies. We all live in a world that is changing faster than ever, with a lot of speed, a lot of turbulences, and coworkers now need to adapt and to open their chakras on important matters. 

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): What are the companies asking for in priority? We talk a lot about soft skills in the upskilling process. Is this something you’re working on too? 

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy) : I think that in the end, the word ‘soft skills’ is a generic word, that can incorporate multiple topics. We have a catalog of 1,200 courses teaching soft skills. However, we categorize and editorialize them under the theme of companies’ transformations. Nowadays, digital is a soft skill. New management techniques, the lean management, agile methods, stress management, inclusion are soft skills. And for the company, it is becoming a true managerial transformation. Companies’ organization are changing. We observe cultural transformations too: working with international employees for example is becoming a major topic as we’re more and more in contact with the international business world. How do we work with Chinese people, with Romanians, with Indians? More than 40% of our platforms’ users out of our 800,000 learners are located outside Europe. Everyday, we see behavioral differences in companies, in the way people learn or interact with each other. To tackle cultural transformations, we have now in our catalog courses and content – co-edited with our partners – on how to write a good e-mail in English, for example, or on how to welcome and listen to an international coworker. These are soft skills too, but we call this the cultural transformation of companies. 

Alexia Borg (DLM News): Very interesting! Last year at the very same tradeshow, we spoke about Learning Experience Platforms. One year later, is it still relevant for you? 

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Actually, yes, we’re still there, it’s still an experience to play Coorpacademy, we do like to use to word ‘play’. It’s still an joyful experience to play Coorpacademy, as we have more than 80% learners who complete the modules they’ve started…

Alexia Borg (DLM News): This is huge!

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): We also have a lot of original content, co-edited and co-created with more than 50 partners, like IBM, Fabernovel, Forbes, Challenges – to name a few. The Learning Experience Platform part, if I may say, is to broadcast this content elegantly, efficiently, with a qualitative experience that makes you, me, anyone want to do more of it. We like to say that our content is backed by great user experiences, that is backed by great data which allow AI-powered or machine learning recommendations… But it has to come to one end: the learning, and the learner. We don’t want to create technology just for the sake of it. It has to be fueling the learning experience, the content. We don’t want to do new features just to do new features. In the past, we’ve ‘killed’ features which were not used, that we thought were good ideas internally – in some cases, data analysis told us they were not such great ideas for the learner. And in the end, all our work comes to the same end: the learner.   

Fanny Berthon (BFM Business): So, yes to digitalization, yes to technologies, but not at the expense of the learner?

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy) : We keep the user, the learner, at the center of all our thinking processes. The KPIs we observe the most are actually the engagement rate, the return rate, the Net Promoter Score… Those KPIs enlightening us on how people use the platform and especially on how people like it!

Alexia Borg (DLM News): Thanks a lot to making us go through those new transformations, Frédérick!

Frédérick Bénichou (Coorpacademy): Thank you!