Who We Are
Welcome to this course, where we'll do our best to explain how we work at OpenClassrooms. 🤗
Before going any further, we need to clarify one key point. The question is not, "What does OpenClassrooms do?" (more on that later), but "Why does OpenClassrooms even exist?" What do we stand for?
We think that answering this question first will help you better understand the rest of this course. So let's get started!
Our Mission (long-term goal)
Everything ultimately comes down to one simple question:
Why does OpenClassrooms exist?
OpenClassrooms is here to make education accessible. Our motto is: Making education accessible.
It looks simple, but it's a huge mission! It's one that we can't solve overnight and may never accomplish.
Can you imagine a day when we'll be able to say, "OK, everyone has equal access to high-quality education; there's nothing more we can do, and everything is great!" Oh, you do? Wow, you're super ambitious. We like you already! 😀
We believe education is a basic human right, one that changes people's lives and pushes them to be their best selves.
Our Vision (mid-term goal)
You've read the mission, and now you're probably thinking:
This mission is ambitious. How do people know what to do on a daily basis to get there? 🤔
That is why we also have a vision statement: it tells us how to pursue our mission for years to come.
OpenClassrooms' current vision statement is: We help people to find jobs and remain employable.
We have set an ambitious goal for 2025: every year, we want to enable 500,000 individuals to have a career outcome. Our exact definition of career outcome is the following:
A student (either free user, SPARK user or degree student) has a career outcome when they credit OpenClassrooms with having helped them in one of the following areas :
finding a new job, internship, or an apprenticeship
starting a new business or becoming a freelancer
receiving a change of job title, and/or a salary increase, and/or landing a new job as an internal mobility that couldn’t have been performed without OpenClassrooms’ training.
A career outcome can't be counted twice for the same student over a 12 month period.
Career outcomes are our north-star metric.
We think this is a vision worth pursuing. It makes a lot of sense: the world is moving at a faster pace, new jobs are being created, others are currently disappearing. How can we help those who struggle with these changes? With education! Yes, we think education is the answer to a lot of things. 😉
OpenClassrooms courses are designed with the professional world in mind. We've chosen to focus on courses that can help you find work quickly. That is why we've decided to put aside younger learners (K-12), at least for the moment.
To get us to 500,000 career outcomes, we focus our efforts on two main priorities: apprenticeships and reskilling. We aim to become an uncontested leader in apprenticeship and reskilling by 2025 (we'll dig deeper into this later in the course).
But that's not the end of it! By 2030, we want to expand our reach even further, becoming the leading future-ready skills provider. Our intended impact? 5 to 10 million positive career outcomes every year!
You might be wondering: how do 2030 goals and 2025 goals differ?
By 2030 we hope to have established ourselves as an upskilling provider, on top of our expertise in apprenticeship and reskilling.
How We Decide What We Should Do
The mission is essential because it helps us determine when we should do a project and, perhaps more importantly, when we shouldn't.
We often ask ourselves, "Is this worth doing?". Every new project requires time and effort, and we can quickly drown in the amount of work to do. On the other hand, we shouldn't miss new opportunities either.
Here are two examples of decisions we've made based on our mission and vision.
Yes, We Should Do This 👍
We've been delivering online courses for years. It's our main job, and we're good at it. We've even created full learning paths by regrouping specific courses and projects to help people learn a new job. These paths can lead to a state-endorsed degree.
Then, one day, we had an idea: why should we stop when someone gets a degree? Isn't it part of our vision to help people get a job?
You could say that we've done our job since we've delivered a degree that tells people when they are ready. However, considering our vision, we didn't completely achieve our work.
So we decided to give professional advice to learners who have finished a path, including courses and mentors, to help them search for a job and prepare for interviews.
No, We Shouldn't Do This 👎
Let's look at another example. We've been offering some K-12 exam prep math courses for years on OpenClassrooms.
While people seem to like them, they've been on hold for a while because we've been busy with other topics. Then, one day, we had an opportunity to resume creating the math courses and found a good teacher who could help build them. Everything seemed perfect, except - we didn't do it.
We asked ourselves: Should we take on this project? Will it help people find a new job, as our vision claims? Well, hardly. It is more of an academic course.
Would it be useful? Sure! Did we want to do it? You bet! But sometimes we have to make hard choices, and our mission and vision statements help us make these kinds of decisions.
