How do we build OpenClassrooms trainings? Backwards.

At the beginning, there were only courses on OpenClassrooms. However, since 2013, we've built degree-awarding trainings on top of these courses to help people find a job.

In practice, if students find a job... it means that we've done our job. Job placement is therefore the main KPI we're following at OpenClassrooms. We give it similar weight as revenue figures, because we're looking to have impact.

In the traditional education system, a student will:

1. Follow courses
2. Validate what they have learned with an exam
3. ... and then look for a job

Schools generally produce courses, then exams, and then they let students find a job at the end.

We chose to took the opposite methodology at OpenClassrooms: we start by first looking at the job our students are aiming at. This is how we explain it internally:

This is how we make it happen:

1. We look for jobs in high demand. We use job boards and aggregators such as Talent Neuron. Jobs that are not in high demand are not part of our strategy: we focus on jobs we know our students have the highest chance to be recruited for... because recruiters are desperately looking for them.
2. We extract the skills from the selected job. We do an in-depth analysis of the job. We meet experts and recruiters. Quite often, companies don't agree with one another. "Data scientist" can mean different things in different companies. Our role is to make an editorial choice: on average, what skills are expected for this job?
3. Next, we write the projects briefs for our students. By working on these projects, students will prove they have acquired the required skills. Projects are inspired by real missions students could be assigned to once in the job. A project will validate one or several skills at a time (no more than 4-5 skills).
4. Finally, this is when we create courses. Only at the end. Once we have written the project briefs, not before. We ask ourselves: what resources will the students need to complete this project? We create our own courses that are published for free, under a Creative Commons license. We also list external resources, so students are used to look elsewhere and not only on OpenClassrooms.

Course creation is only step 4. It's the longest step and the most expensive one (note that we don't ask people to pay for courses, only for projects!). Courses are relevant only if steps 1 to 3 are well executed.

We need about 3 months for steps 1 to 3. Each course takes 5 months to produce with technical experts, instructional designers and video/motion designers. We parallelize course production, which means it doesn't take years to build a full training: we generally need 1 year to produce all the courses.

Finally, our students and recruiters will give us feedback, especially during jurys at the end of the training. We use this feedback to update the training: its skill set, its projects and its courses.