It takes a community.
In celebration of our 10-year anniversary, we’re highlighting some of our best people, partners, and instructors. Over the next few weeks, you’ll have the opportunity to be inspired by some incredible stories that have driven the success of our enterprise business.
Keep reading to meet Nathalie Doré, who works as a transformation leader at BNP Paribas Cardif — one of our incredible clients. Over the past three years, BNP Paribas Cardif has partnered with us to upskill their employees to prepare them for the future of work.
GA: Where are you located, and what is your role at BNP Paribas Cardif?
Nathalie Doré: I have two answers for my location. Physically, I’m in the Paris region, but I define myself as a worldwide citizen — I work for a very international company. BNP Paribas Cardif is present in 33 countries across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. As the chief digital and acceleration officer at BNP Paribas Cardif, my role is to accelerate the development of the company and its transformation.
GA: What are some of the innovations and transformations in-process for BNP Paribas Cardif?
Nathalie Doré: Right now, we are focusing on being a tech-driven company. Our transformation plans span about five years. The first plan was from 2010–2015 and focused on digital transformation. The second transformation was from 2015–2020, and it was more about having digital everywhere in the company, reinventing the customer experience, the partner experience, and the employee experience. During this second transformation, in 2018, we created our upskilling program with General Assembly to make sure we will get the right skills all along our transformation journey because it is a continuous effort.
Our current focus is being a tech-driven company, with making insurance more accessible as our mission.
So, what can that mean? For instance, it means offering to our partners BNP Paribas Cardif as a service or as a platform, with digital capabilities at its heart. And of course, it means providing our customers with the right solutions to reach their goals and supporting them through difficult situations. For instance, we developed an “employability ecosystem” with a local partner in Latin America, alongside our unemployment insurance.
GA: How does learning fit into all of these big transformation plans you have?
Nathalie Doré: When you have a plan to grow and drive your company’s growth, the first asset you must think about is your human capital. We have 8,000 employees around the world. They are experts in insurance and our model of distribution. We see people as a big asset. Because things are moving very fast, the challenge is to accompany the 4th industrial revolution by bringing the skills of the future to our people. This is why we wanted to launch the program with GA: we had this vision of having a very international workforce with an entrepreneurship mindset. At the same time, we could see new skills happening around data, UX design, and agile methodologies. We knew we had to do a continuous upgrade of our employee’s skills.
When we launched the program with GA, we knew we were the leading company in creditor insurance, but we didn’t want to take our place in the very challenging personal insurance market for granted. There are always new players coming in, so we wanted to have a culture of being a learning company. When I say a learning company, it includes having people learn new skills. This is what we did with the Skill Up program we built with GA. We set a goal to upskill and reskill more than 1,000 people between 2018 and 2022.
GA: Can you tell me about the Skill Up program?
Nathalie Doré: We launched the Skill Up program in 2018 with the sponsorship of our CEO. With our transformation plans, we wanted to be more agile and to have our people feel comfortable with our plan, knowing they had the tools and skills at their disposal to be proactive and embrace the change.
It was important to have an inclusive program to which all employees could apply. Applicants write a letter of motivation explaining why they’d like to take part in the upskilling or reskilling program.
As I said before, the ambition was to reskill and upskill 1,000 employees by the end of 2022. We are on track, having already trained more than 900 unique participants from all over the world, including Europe, Asia, and Latin America. An important part of this program’s ambition was to make sure it was truly international and build a strong universal vocabulary and skill sets across geographies.
Participants are from different areas throughout the business, including operations, finance, accounting, and marketing and communications.
Overall feedback was really good.
GA: What impact has this program had on your workforce?
Nathalie Doré: We saw an impact on the mindset of employees. The idea that someone studied marketing but can be a UX designer tomorrow… I think knowing they can learn new skills without having to leave their job encourages people to think differently about what they can do in the company and what their career path could be. Having access to lifelong learning inside the company is a perk and not one you’d necessarily think of first when joining a big company.
GA: You also deployed leadership training. Why was that an important step?
Nathalie Doré: When we launched the Skill Up program, we knew that managers would understand why they should embrace the transformation, but we realized they might need training of their own to understand the necessity of the new skills.
That’s why we worked with General Assembly to create and deploy managers’ workshops. It’s a two-day training that explains why it’s important to be customer-focus, data-centric, and digital-ready.
Managing people is developing people, and once we demonstrated that we were giving them the tools to do just that, it was easier to get them on board.
GA: What advice do you have for leaders taking on digital transformation?
Nathalie Doré: You should be convinced that people are your first assets; we are talking about human capital. That is the most important thing. Then you must make your employees feel that too, that they are important to the company. Fulfilled employees make for satisfied customers, who make for contented partners: it is a fully virtuous circle.
Investing in training programs puts your employees at the heart of your transformation. They need to know that this is a win-win situation: the staff gain new skills and the company has exactly the skills it needs.
GA: What excites you most about the future of work?
Nathalie Doré: I’m an optimistic person, I always see the glass half full, so there may be biases in my answers. First of all, I would say it’s very exciting because career paths are so open. When I think about my grandparents, they were in one job for their entire lives. Right now, you can do multiple different jobs, even while staying in the same company.
I have been working in the BNP Paribas Group for 20 years and have held many different positions. I’ve lived in various countries and worked with a lot of different people. I think it’s very exciting to be able to have such wide career path possibilities from companies.
Another thing that I find very exciting is that in the past, you were working in big corporations or you were an entrepreneur. Today, you can be working in a big corporation and be an entrepreneur. We have programs in our company for people who want to do entrepreneurial projects that are very interesting and nurture our entrepreneurial culture— this is key to staying agile.
So yes, while there can be some fear about the future because we are talking about tasks being automatized, it also brings lots of opportunities. Having the right mindset and tools to seize these opportunities is key. So, I’m quite optimistic about the future.
Stay tuned for more incredible stories from our team and partners in the coming weeks. Want to learn more about how GA can make a difference in your business today? Get in touch.