Chapter 2 | Assessing Training Needs 1

1.5
Case Study and Question Time with
Laurent REICH, Governance & Digital
Learning Director at LOral

1. Who are you and what is your role in the company you are working at?
I am Laurent Reich, and I joined LOral 4 years ago as the Governance & Digital Learning
Director. My mission is twofold. First, to achieve the professionalization of our 250 learning
managers all over the world. Second, to develop digital learning solutions in order to
achieve our 2020 ambition: to offer learning to 100% of our employees.
I have been working in the learning sector for 20 years. Before joining LOral, I was in a
big European learning consultancy agency called Cegos.

2. What is the biggest challenge for corporate education that you are facing in your
company?
Our biggest challenge today is turning LOral into a learning company. This means that
learning cannot only be the sole responsibility of corporate learning departments but
everyone: employees, managers, leaders etc.
This poses 3 challenges:
1. Engaging our learners: As we focus on learner-centric development, we aim to engage
our learners in all of our actions. Learning is all about empowering learners by giving them
the power to learn at their own pace, and engaging leaders as teachers transmitting the
knowledge.
2. One of our main challenges is convincing businesses that learning is not only about
training. It is crucial for everybody to learn in order to adapt themselves and their job to the
main upcoming changes. Learning has to be very closely attached to business.

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3. Finally, the last point is about breaking down silos with the collaboration and the test and
learn approach. In a culture of excellence, such as at LOral, it is a challenge to make
people accept learning from failure and approach work like a prototype.

3. How did you / how do you decide on a digital strategy in your company?
At LOral, we have the ambition to offer learning to 100% of our employees. This is
possible via a unique digital learning platform open to everyone.
This is why we made the choice to implement a platform with bespoke and on-the-shelf
contents that cater to a variety of learning needs. All contents are open to everyone from
senior executives to personal assistants.
On our learning platform, we encourage learners to discover the learning content that suits
them best among 4000 options. We also prescribe specific e-learning modules. For
example, the Learning Digital team built a fast track for all the marketing and
communication teams. It is composed of 8 videos from internal experts + 8 modules that
upskill them in the essentials of digital marketing.
With our internal HR information system, we can easily enroll learners in online modules
and follow their individual advancement.
The management of the platform is centralized in my team. One full-time employee and an
apprentice are in charge of integrating contents, advising teams developing content
internally or with agencies, developing web design development and improving the userexperience.

4. What kind of tools are you using and what technical implications or challenges are
you facing?
The way we manage our learning platform is very particular. For one, we have our own
internal training management system (face-to-face catalog, development plan, session
planification, learner enrollment, invoice). Secondly, we want to let learners access all the
contents on the platform.
This is why the technology we use has to be flexible and must allow us freely manage the
platform. For example, my team can code customized pages in HTML in order to offer the
most attractive online display and engage learners.
A challenge we face is offering the best mobile app for our learners with a personalized
experience.
We also need to use data analytics more in order to help us improve the engagement of
our learners through recommended content.
Finally, we also have the challenge of being able to create attractive content that suits our
business needs with agility and speed. This requires reducing the time to market and
deliver one digital learning solution.

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5. How do you get employees excited about digital learning? What are your best
practices or tips and tricks? And how do you make learning social?
ATTRACTIVE CONTENT:
In everything we do in digital learning, we have to be learner-centric and consider our
learners as our consumers.
Each product or service has to be simple for both the learners and the learning managers.
But it shouldnt only be simple - everything we do also has to be attractive and in line with
the daily digital habits of our learners.
Moreover, we have put certification process in place on our LMS platform: it is now
possible to get a certificate and attach it to ones LinkedIn profile. We did this, for example,
for the essentials of digital marketing (cf above).
PERSONALIZED COMMUNICATION:
The development of a new digital learning format does not stop when it is online: attractive
communication has to be rolled-out with a customized animation of the community.
For example, we send personalized emails to all our learners each month, recommend
content on the main LOral intranet in line with our business challenges each week, and
implement specific animations for the newcomers community. The impact in terms of
connection on our LMS platform has been very positive.
Each launch of a new digital learning solution includes a complete communication kit
composed of video teaser, posters, email templates, goodies etc.
THE BEST DIGITAL LEARNER EXPERIENCE:
Beyond our LMS platform, we also use digital learning during our seminars. For example,
we co-developed a tool called Klaxoon with a French start-up that allows anyone to
digitalize their presentation with fun and interactive activities.
Providing its own wifi, Klaxoon enables participants to connect their own device to a
session, including gamified quizzes, surveys, brainstorms, wordcloud etc. There is always a
wow effect when we use it.
In 2015, we started a worldwide rollout to provide a KlaxoonBox in more than 45 countries
at LOral: every learning manager can now improve the learner experience by using this
innovative and simple tool. In January 2016, Klaxoon received an Innovation Award at the
Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.
MOBILE & SOCIAL LEARNING:
Giving our learners the opportunity to learn what they want, where they want and on any
device is crucial for keeping them engaged.
Offering MOOCs that allow our employees learn from the best universities with maximized
social interaction is one of the best practices.
We also ran a pilot in mobile learning for our learning managers community. The mobile
app is called Learning Genius and the concept is simple: for 5 minutes every day, every
learning manager answers 4 questions about our learning strategy, tool, KPIs, and offer on

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their smartphone. There is also a Whos who? question: learners have to guess who is
the Learning Manager in a certain country, based on one picture. The feedback has been
really positive, and learners love earning points and being on the top of the leaderboard.

6. Please share your best practices regarding Return on Education, Knowledge

Transfer, Impact Measurement and Defining KPIs with us: do you have any advice or
tips?
At LOral, we not only measure the satisfaction of our learners, we also aim to measure
the impact of all of our learning actions. With a tool developed by an external partner, we
automatically administer evaluation questionnaires to our learners and their managers in
order to better analyze the impact of our actions and benchmark them with other
companies. This tool manages our continuous progress: upgrading seminars quality,
proving our contribution to business, challenging our external partners.

7. Last but not least: Corporate digital learning trends - any predictions? And how
would you like to see corporate digital learning in the future?
LEARN OR DIE!
We need to allow our employees to learn how to learn in order to continually keep up with
the skills they need in a fast-changing world.
This becomes possible through many innovative learning trends. Mobile provides flexibility
to learners. Learner engagement increases motivation and create new and magic
moments. For example, engagement can be optimised with serious games, virtual reality,
artificial intelligence, the individualization of learning path through curation of contents via a
learning concierge who selects the best recommended content for a certain learner.
Finally, social learning breaks the mold of classic classroom training and unlocks learning
potential.

@iversity 2016, KPMG-iversity MOOC Corporate Digital Learning