A bad overall experience. I don't recommand! - Anonymous employee OpenClassrooms Employee Review

1.0
Mar 11, 2020
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

A positive mission: online education. Nice employees. Lovely office.

Cons

An extremely heavy workload. A silos organisation, most of the managers don't cooperate with other teams. If you need to work with other teams, it might make your job extremely difficult. They have a lot of online surveys to monitor the mood of their employees. It does not take a long time to realize that these online surveys are not anonymous and that the HR Department use them to punish people that complain.

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OpenClassrooms Response
6y
Hi, We highly appreciate that you took the time to tell us about your experience with OpenClassrooms. Thanks a lot. Regarding the silo structure and politics, this is something I am aware of. This is not something I want to see at OpenClassrooms, so I am actively working on this, with the help of our leadership team and the wider team. I think we’ve fixed a lot in the past couple of months already, so let me explain more in detail. We have lived quite an intense growth in the past year with more than 100+ new employees (roughly x2). We had many new teams, new colleagues, new leaders, a lot of changes, and we are still all learning how to collaborate together. Here is what we are doing to address the issues you raised, amongst many other initiatives: we clearly expressed to all our leadership that we'd like them to be role models on our principles and behaviors, including great internal and transversal communications, team play, care, trust, and absence of politics all managers and individual contributors are assessed on soft skills and behaviors aligned to our 4 principles. This includes good interpersonal communications, absence of politics, and team play. We help, train and coach those of them who are behind expectations, and sometimes have to make a hard decision when somebody crosses the line this year, we aligned and shared smart goals and bonus plans on cross functional problems and targets (for example, bookings and revenue for sales people and also for global operations, or tracking revenue in our education team) we launched bottom-up workgroups to strengthen our culture and our principles (notably on recognition, reward, learning as an organization, lessons learned, etc.). we revamped our weekly all-hands to lighten them and highlight great cross-team successes (for example recently with our new program with Pôle emploi). This also includes frequent communications from various department leaders by email to the wider team. Recent results show that the employee engagement and Employer Net Promoter Score increased quite significantly, and is well above market standards. We are still very committed to making it even better and better. Regarding the workload, we have an open-door policy: if your workload is too high, feel free to reach out to your manager, HR or myself directly to see where the problem comes from and think together to design the best solution to make sure the workload is acceptable. We also provide access to Qare, a visio solution to help you get in touch with doctors such as therapists if you have problems handling some situations at work, especially during this lockdown. About the surveys, I can confirm that they are totally anonymous. We use Supermood to track our employee engagement and you can see yourself on their website that the tool is based on anonymous surveys. Since the launch of the tool, we shared administrators access to every employee, so everybody sees exactly what I or HR see too. Saying that these surveys are not anonymous is just false, and as well as saying it’s used to bully employees. I would value your feedback on why you thought this as I have no idea why you believe this. Please send me an email on pierre.dubuc@openclassrooms.com and I'll make sure to see how we could implement it. If you want to remain anonymous, you can send your email from any anonymous email account if you like.Your identity is not the issue here, what I care about is improving things in our company. Thank you again so much, Pierre Dubuc, CEO of OpenClassrooms.

Explore other reviews about OpenClassrooms

5.0
Feb 1, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The company offers unlimited vacation and they are serious about you taking it. You can end up with 5, 6, even 7 weeks of vacation, so long as your projects are done on time and well. As a result, when you need a break, you can take one, and when you need to work hard, you can. The students are inspiring and the whole company focuses on their positive experience.

Cons

Like many start-up cultures, the company uses a diverse range of platforms and products that don't always speak to each other. As a result, different teams may start the same project at the same time. They claim to have "market salaries" but in reality the pay is low.

3
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OpenClassrooms Response
5y
Hi, Thank you for taking the time to send your feedback and for your work at OpenClassrooms. We are very grateful for the amazing work the team does all year long and we know how hard everyone works. It is therefore essential for us to ensure they are able to take well-deserved breaks to unwind when they feel they need it. No one can deliver a good job when exhausted, this is a win-win situation. As to the two flaws you mention, I would like to give additional information. First, regarding salaries, I can assure you that we do conduct regular market research and align our salary grid to them. In addition, we are currently leading a harmonization policy based on positions and skills that will allow us to have a clear and transparent reference table. Based on the global grade on Salaries and Benefits on Glassdoor, I would think that most people would not agree with you on this. As I mentioned above, we are strong believers in a win-win relationship with our collaborators and providing them with fair wages, advantageous benefits (free “mutuelle”, free access to Gymlib, meal vouchers, professional development support) and good working conditions (remote-first policy) is of the utmost importance to us. Please let us know if you think that your salary does not align to market benchmarks as we’d be happy to analyze your situation and give more precise feedback, or readjust if relevant. As to the many different tools and platforms used internally, this is indeed a situation that we are currently working on. Some tools are inherited from earlier times when our processes were not as structured as they are now, as they involved fewer people. As the team has grown considerably over the last two years, we have had to change our processes, and we now need to scale our tools accordingly. We have already started since last year in Product Management, and progressively in the Global Operations department but this is a long process to ensure the migration and safety of our data and make sure the new tools will be reliable in the long term. Getting there! Thank you for your patience on this matter. Please don’t hesitate to speak to your manager or contact me directly if you have any suggestions on how we can improve further. Pierre Dubuc Co-founder and CEO of OpenClassrooms pierre.dubuc@openclassrooms.com
2.0
Aug 31, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It's fun work. The payment per session is mostly fair. The company seems like it has ambitions. The founders seem like good people.

Cons

The job description says that it's up to the mentor how many students they want. This is a flat out lie. They don't promise how many students you can have and they explicitly tell you this once you are hired. The on-boarding process was a long dysfunctional mess and I assumed it would be worth it until I realized they have no intention of providing me with a decent roster of students. As it stands I am still working with them but I am on the fence. I currently have 2 dedicated students (I wanted at least 7-10) and my interaction with them is rewarding. Communication via email with the office liaisons is mediocre and they take forever to reply - if at all. I have a feeling this company is going the direction of other bloated corporations and will eventually evolve a toxic internal culture that bleeds out. I don't want to see this happen but it's up to the founders.

4
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OpenClassrooms Response
6y
Hi, I highly appreciate that you took the time to tell us about your experience with OpenClassrooms. Thank you for this. We previously answered to your comment, but I wanted to give an updated reply with more substance. Here are some answers to the different points that you made: 1/ We do not say that you can have as many students as you want, because as you can understand, the flow is also depending on the number of student enrollments in OpenClassrooms paths. Here is what we say in our job description : “You will work at your own pace, and you can have 1, 5, or even 15 students (max 30), according to your availability and OpenClassrooms' student enrollment". It is said again during the onboarding process: “How many students can I mentor? This depends on several factors: The number of students you want to mentor, which you can indicate on your mentor profile The number of students who are arriving to start an OpenClassrooms path The number of mentors who are available to mentor on the same path This is why we cannot guarantee how many students you can mentor. We recommend that you start with one student. See if you like it. Then gradually increase your capacity to take on a second student, then a third” Finally, the contract signed between us and our mentors states that: “OPENCLASSROOMS will make its reasonable efforts to assign the number of Students requested by the SERVICE PROVIDER, but it will in no event be obliged to supply a volume defined in advance nor commit to any regularity in the number of Students from one period to another. The number of Students to be mentored will depend in particular on the commercial success of OPENCLASSROOMS and on the number of mentors available at the time of the assignment and the logistics decided by OPENCLASSROOMS.” With that said, we are always trying to improve and therefore I would be interested to know what misled you so we can update and be more explicit. 2/ I am deeply sorry if you’ve experienced a bad onboarding process, I am also interested in more specific feedback to know what didn’t work as it should and improve. You will see my personal email at the end of this message, if you agree to send a more specific feedback. We already increased our recruitment team, improved our candidate screening processes to reduce the wait time from application submission to interview, simplified the document collection process to make the onboarding process as quick and simple as possible. Today, the average onboarding time is 27 days from the date a candidate submits their application and we’re aiming to reduce it to 15 days. We want the hiring process to be a positive start to our collaboration with mentors and your feedback will help us continue to improve our processes. 3/ I also understand that you’ve had difficulties in reaching out with the mentorship team: be assured that I am unhappy with this situation, and I apologize for the inconvenience. Here too, more specific details would be much appreciated to better understand the flaws you’ve encountered. We receive hundreds of requests weekly, and we’re striving to improve our service levels every day. On average, we now (June 2020) respond to all requests within 4 business hours, resolve them within 12 business hours, and have had an average satisfaction rate of 98% over the past 2 years. Some requests, as you can imagine, are more complex than others and therefore take more time to handle. I am truly sorry if this has been your experience but I wanted you to know that providing excellent service to our mentor community is one of our top priorities! Pierre Dubuc, Co-founder and CEO of OpenClassrooms pierre.dubuc@openclassrooms.com
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