Digit Academy: Learning to support innovation

As part of its IT 2025 program, Crédit Agricole Group underwent a digital transformation, making IT an essential strategic partner for the everyday work of the business, and positioning IT at the heart of Crédit Agricole's new digital culture.

The “Skills” sub-program (one of the 10 sub-programs that make up IT 2025) aims to harness the best technological and digital expertise and skills in our teams to support the Group's transformation ambitions.

Digit Academy was set up to achieve this ambition, giving everyone control over their own development, learning pathway and network, leading to upskilling on a long-term basis.

The learning platform was launched last April. This IT and digital academy's goal is to be at the cutting edge of technological developments in terms of learning by having the best tech expertise with a desire to learn and gain skills in order to support the Group's overall aim for digital transformation.

By offering innovative content and meeting the highest technological standards, Digit Academy is an essential tool for sharing the Group's deeply ingrained culture of innovation, skill development and support for digital transformation.

The issue of learning as an engine for growth, as well as for agility, has become one of the major concerns for organizations. The creation of this academy intends to act as a global response to the challenges to competitiveness that large organizations are facing in a modern environment characterized by a shortage of a talent and the need to refresh skills, particularly in the IT professions. Thanks to Digit Academy, people have the necessary resources to learn through independent study and/or by interacting with experts, enabling them to gain new skills easily. The approach is intended to encourage proactive learning, allowing people to develop their skills independently by attending training sessions whenever and wherever suits them. There's also the opportunity for people to contribute to this great project by suggesting content for sharing their learnings with others.

Six themes were chosen for Digit Academy, corresponding to the six main initiatives in the IT 2025 strategy. These are AI data, Agility, Sustainable IT, Development, Cybersecurity and Architecture. These six themes represent the six communities and six channels of the academy. Within these six communities, each person can share, publish, and interact with the other members of their community or communities. At channel level, only expert users have permission to curate and publish content, and to create learning pathways.

For teams that want to constantly develop the platform, making it more user-friendly and pushing agile content, this platform is easy to manage. One theme is highlighted each month so that everyone sees it when they log in, showing that the platform is active.

Finally, to ensure complementarity and a consistent user experience, teams are working to integrate other platforms and solutions into Digit Academy.

People like how easy it is to create, publish and share content using the Cornerstone Learning Experience platform. Thanks to its ability to work across devices, a wide range of content, such as podcasts, videos, and articles, can be brought together in one place.

To date, 1000 people have joined Digit Academy out of the Group's 11,000 programmers. The Academy aims to reach 3000 users by the end of the year through the integration of three new entities.

Beyond the obstacles to overcome in terms of adoption, the challenge is to instill a genuine Digit Academy “reflex,” encouraging everyone to sign in spontaneously, so they become the drivers of their own progress toward lifelong learning.

Other objectives include opening up to other content providers as well as internationalization of the platform, particularly in terms of language. Some background work by Cornerstone Learning Experience is needed to support the Academy's multilingual offering, with the Group's British, Italian, and Portuguese branches keen to use the Academy and create their own content.