OpenClassrooms
Pierre Dubuc is cofounder and CEO of OpenClassrooms.
- Corporations are spending billions to retrain workers amid an intense battle for tech workers. And several top companies are turning to OpenClassrooms to help do that.
- Cofounder and CEO Pierre Dubuc launched the company at 11 years old, when he and cofounder Matthieu Nebra couldn't find the courses they wanted at school. Now, the company has trained roughly 3 million students and operates in 130 countries.
- While partners like Microsoft believe traditional educational pathways are still relevant, the rise of OpenClassrooms and other online institutions show just how eager organizations are to pursue a number of different pathways to upskill and retrain their workforce.
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Companies are investing heavily to retrain workers as the war for tech talent intensifies.
Amazon pledged $700 million to retrain a third of its workforce in the next six years. Professional services firm PricewaterhouseCooper, or PWC, is similarly investing $3 billion to retrain 275,000 employees in the next four years. And Microsoft is in the midst of training 1,000 new artificial intelligence engineers.
The one thing they all have in common? The companies are relying on OpenClassrooms to help. With Amazon, for example, OpenClassrooms is reskilling fulfillment center workers to become web developers or digital marketers.
The partnerships show just how critical new educational pathways outside traditional colleges are to companies trying to overcome the talent shortage that is hindering digital overhaul efforts.
"Reskilling was nowhere 10 years ago," CEO and cofounder Pierre Dubuc told Business Insider. "Now you have so many large companies investing massively on upskilling and reskilling as a way to uplift their workforce, improve the employer's brand, increase the loyalty of their employees. It's definitely a tipping point right now."
Dubuc's journey to grow OpenClassrooms started early. When he was 11 years old, Dubuc and his cofounder, Matthieu Nebra, began creating online courses because they could not find the classes they wanted in their school. Now, the company has trained roughly 3 million students and operates in 130 countries. It also guarantees that graduates will find a job within six months or get their money back.
"It's really a way for us to make sure that we'd build the right curriculum with the right competencies in high demand on the markets [and] to update those curriculum regularly," said Dubuc.
Microsoft's challenge to train new AI engineers
Each enrollee in OpenClassrooms has a dedicated mentor they meet with every week via video conference. The goal is to have a highly personalized experience for each student. But the company also caters the educational programs to the needs of the client.
With Microsoft, for example, it is training employees on general AI skills, but also more specific courses on Azure, the tech behemoth's cloud platform. So over the course of the one-year program, students will meet with their mentor 50 times and emerge with a master's degree, along with a Microsoft certification in AI.
"We obviously are experts in our technology, but our core competency is not making someone employable," said Ed Steidl, director of offering and partnerships at Microsoft. The goal with the OpenClassrooms partnership is "getting people who are work-ready deployed, upskilled, and reskilled, and back into the marketplace in a relatively short time-frame."
While Steidl still sees a role for higher education, legacy institutions are limited in their online offerings and, according to Dubuc, can't handle the pace at which corporations need to reskill employees.
"Which local community college can create 1,000 AI engineers? The scaling is really an issue," he said.
Determining the return on investment from retraining initiatives
One relative unknown is how effective these retraining efforts will be and how to effectively measure the success of the programs.
PWC is taking a client-centric approach to evaluating its own initiative by asking, among other things, how they view the professional services firm compared to the competition, then evaluating the feedback across the three-year training exercise to see if it improves. It's also tracking whether employee retention rises for those who enroll, and if increased performance results in financial gains.
"Working with these new tools should allow them to do more with less, or do the same with less," said Mame-Mor Fall, workforce strategy manager at PWC. "That should reflect in our financial metrics."
Some of OpenClassrooms' other clients are also seeing success in their reskilling efforts. It worked with an energy company faced with a declining need for technicians who worked on meters that became connected to a smart grid (this meant they could be managed remotely). The company wanted to invest in training those employees to become IT workers and application developers.
"We had more than a 90% success rate, meaning they went from technician to developer," said Dubuc. That outcome is about average across OpenClassrooms.
But it's not just the companies that are seeing radical transformations in their workforce. One enrollee studied in prison to become a freelance web developer. Another was a cashier at a supermarket who is a digital product manager making three times her salary. The stories help inspire OpenClassrooms' employees to continue the mission.
"Every week we have an all-hands meeting with the team - we're a team of 200 - and we ask a student graduate to tell her story in front of the team," Dubuc said. "It's so emotional, people telling what they have been through and how that's challenged and impacted their lives."