By Devangi Narang
In this era of risk and instability, industry skills can become obsolete within months. Thus, it is imperative for businesses to provide direct access to the best academic knowledge, to their employees. This gives the employees an opportunity to manage their learning curve. It helps them to enhance their skill sets. In a drive to achieve this, insurance company AXA has entered into a global partnership with online learning platform Coursera. This will help it in developing learning paths, curating relevant content and mapping out future competencies for its employees. AXA will adopt Coursera’s enterprise platform: ‘Coursera for Business’.
What is Coursera for Business?
Coursera, an online learning platform headquartered in California, launched Coursera for Business in September last year. It is an enterprise platform that enables firms to utilise Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) providers learning content, created by 145 universities and institutions. This helps in addressing training and development needs of businesses.
Within a year of the launch, Coursera has been adopted by more than 90 large enterprises and government customers around the world including top global companies like PayPal, LOreal, Danone, JP Morgan Chase, Air France- KLM, Axis Bank and Boston Consulting Group. The customers benefit from many powerful features, including curated, in-depth content from top universities, reputable certifications, a robust and easy-to-use mobile platform, and centralised program management and progress tracking tools.
Benefits to AXA
As a part of the strategic upskilling effort, AXA conducted a 3-month course in association with ‘Coursera for Business’. More than a thousand AXA employees registered themselves as learners, with as many as 50% receiving certifications for at least one course. This new, expanded partnership will provide AXAs entire global workforce, with an access to more than 300 top-quality online courses in a variety of high-demand fields like data science, digital marketing, and leadership. Upon completion, AXA employees will receive shareable electronic course certificates. AXA will also explore creating custom content on the Coursera platform.
This partnership is a major element of AXAs strategy to build an agile and self-learning organisation. It will address their rapidly-evolving workforce development needs, and continue their tradition of leadership and innovation. Coursera will also be working closely with the AXA team to map out the key competencies that employees will need in the future. It will develop learning paths focused on the in-demand skills that the employees will need to succeed in tomorrows workplace and economy.
Quest for an edge
Adaptability is the key to get a competitive edge in the market. Globalisation, new technologies, and greater transparency have combined to turn over the business environment and give many CEOs a deep sense of unease. To quote another example, American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) launched a program in 2012 that combines online and classroom-based coursework in subjects like digital networking and data science. This program is a part of its new strategy to transform the company and its employees by 2020.
Companies around the world have begun to realise that a scalable, world-class learning and developing model is essential to business agility and talent management in todays fast-changing global economy. In a nutshell, the best way for organisations to ensure productivity of the workforce is to make sure that the employees are continuously learning.
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