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In a world where transformation is now continuous, a company’s ability to rapidly develop its employees’ skills has become a prerequisite for its own capacity to transform.
Just a few years ago, companies could approach transformation in cycles. A new organisational structure, a new tool or a new business model could be rolled out over several years before the next major disruption occurred. That pace has changed. Today, transformations are multiple, simultaneous and increasingly rapid.
For Guillaume Lefebvre, this acceleration is fundamentally changing the role of learning within organisations.
In response to transformation, companies can change their processes, organisational structures, products or tools. But these changes remain insufficient if employees themselves are unable to adapt their practices and develop their skills.
In other words, transforming a company necessarily means transforming the people who make it work.
Learning is therefore no longer simply a means of supporting change or a support function. It is becoming directly linked to an organisation’s ability to adapt.
This shift is all the more significant because companies now have less and less time to build a lasting competitive advantage based solely on their products. Innovations are quickly observed, replicated and improved upon, making differentiation increasingly difficult to sustain over time.
The challenge is no longer simply to offer a differentiated product, but to enable employees to understand customer expectations more quickly, gain a strong command of the company’s offerings and adapt their practices accordingly. This ability to align depends directly on learning and development.
Training people faster therefore becomes a way for the company itself to adapt more quickly.
This new pace of change is also transforming what is expected of L&D departments.
Delivering high-quality learning programmes remains essential, but it is no longer enough. In an environment where skills must continuously evolve, companies also need to deliver learning faster, to more employees and as closely as possible to their individual needs.
Technology is therefore becoming an essential part of learning’s ability to fulfil its mission.
Digital platforms, personalised learning tools and artificial intelligence can help accelerate access to training and optimise the time employees spend learning.
In some situations, this challenge is particularly tangible. In a highly regulated sector such as banking, for example, employees are regularly required to complete mandatory training. Technology can help identify more precisely what an employee already knows and what they genuinely need to learn, avoiding the need to put everyone through the same standardised learning pathway.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply to further digitalise training. It is about making learning more effective and better suited to the real-world constraints employees face.
However, this growing reliance of learning on technology raises a new question.
If a company’s ability to transform depends on its ability to train its employees, and if that training capability itself depends on technology, then maintaining control over these technologies becomes a strategic issue.
This is precisely where Guillaume Lefebvre sees the question of sovereignty coming into play.
For an L&D department, technological sovereignty is not simply about where data is stored or the nationality of a technology provider. More broadly, it raises the question of how organisations manage the technological dependencies that are essential to the delivery of learning.
Companies need to consider the continuity of their platforms, the security of their data, cybersecurity risks, and their ability to continue training employees in the event of a technology partner failing.
The logic is ultimately similar to that applied to other critical business infrastructure. Once a service becomes essential to operations, its continuity must be ensured.
This is the idea behind Guillaume Lefebvre’s statement: “Technological sovereignty in learning is necessary to ensure the operational sovereignty of companies.”
This evolution ultimately reflects a profound shift in the role of learning within large organisations.
Long regarded as a function that supported transformations decided elsewhere in the organisation, learning is gradually becoming an infrastructure for transformation in its own right.
As technological, economic and regulatory change accelerates, the ability to learn becomes an essential organisational capability.
And as this capability becomes increasingly dependent on technology, L&D departments must also learn to manage their own technological dependencies.
Guillaume Lefebvre sums up this relationship in a simple phrase: “No learning, no transformation.” At the same time, learning empowers both companies and their employees because “while we may lose what we have gained, we never lose what we have learned” (G. Delatour).
Learning may not be a company’s core business. But as every profession and function needs to evolve more quickly, learning is becoming a prerequisite for transformation. And with it, maintaining control over the technologies that enable this transformation is becoming a strategic issue in its own right. In this sense, learning is “at the heart of the company’s business activities.”
The Next CLO consortium, led by Rennes School of Business, supports the EdTech France association in its ambition to strengthen France’s entrepreneurial ecosystem in technologies for education and professional learning.
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