Review Headline - Anonymous employee OpenClassrooms Employee Review

4.0
Apr 11, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great people, great team, great value

Cons

bad processes, stubbornness, full remote reduces communication and increases hierarchy issues

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OpenClassrooms Response
2y
Hello, Thank you for taking the time to write a comment. Thank you for highlighting the quality of the team, I couldn’t agree with you more. We are lucky to have a great team who is highly dedicated to the mission. I am glad you appreciate our values (“We care, we dare, we persist, we tell it as it is”); they are our DNA and at the heart of all our decisions. I understand that, as the team is getting bigger and with our remote-first policy, one can sometimes feel disconnected from other team members and it is true that it can lead to less communication. As we are fully conscious of this risk, we have put in place many tools and processes to fight against silos and encourage communication. Our weekly “La Récré'' all-hands meetings, Slack channels, and newsletters provide regular updates on what is going on in other teams. Informal coffee chats are organized within teams and throughout the whole company. I personally take part in our Random Coffee chats and enjoy meeting team members on a regular basis, as does Mathieu. I know other C-Levels organize Office hours or individual catch-ups with people from their teams at all levels of the hierarchy. Team and individual goals are available in Lattice as they are shared with the whole team; many teams also share their Roadmaps on Notion (direct links are available in the Shared Bookmarks in Chrome). As far as processes are concerned, it is true that they can sometimes seem burdensome and time-consuming but they are also very useful to ensure cooperation and rigour. In fast-evolving contexts, processes can sometimes become obsolete quickly. Bad or inefficient processes should and must be changed and it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that they are. If you have any suggestions or comments to improve such processes, please discuss them with your manager or the person in charge of the project. I am not sure what you are referring to when speaking of “stubbornness” and “hierarchy issues” so I won’t be able to answer you precisely without more detailed context or examples. If one of our pillar values is “we persist”, it is true that there can sometimes be a fine line between persisting and stubbornness but it is important not to fall into that trap. To avoid doing so, our persistence must rely on objective reasoning (there must be an objective, justifiable reason to persist in one direction) rather than individual obstinacy. To do so, I believe that teamwork is key, and therefore communication. I think it is everyone’s right to ask “Why do you think we should keep going in that direction/doing that” when one feels there is a risk of falling into the stubbornness trap. If you have further questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to your manager, your People Success Partner, or me if you want to discuss this in more detail. Once again, thank you for your comment and your work at OpenClassrooms. Pierre Dubuc Co-founder & CEO pierre.dubuc@openclassrooms.com

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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