OpenClassrooms Reviews

3.7

70% would recommend to a friend

(36 total reviews)
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Pierre Dubuc

75% approve of CEO

24% positive business outlook

OpenClassrooms has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 36 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The OpenClassrooms employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Education industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

36 reviews
1.0
11 Mar 2020

A bad overall experience. I don't recommand!

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
5y
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.
3.0
14 Sept 2020

Great business purpose destroyed by dysfunctional leadership execution

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Social impact and purpose Breaking the traditional approach to education to genuinely make it more accessible Being surrounded by individual contributors that care deeply about the business and each other Exposure to a wide range of different individuals with varied skills, knowledge & interests

Cons

Immature leader unable to connect & engage Leadership team made up of predominately white males with similar mindsets, attitudes and behaviours that prevent the opportunity to invite and respect the views & opinions of people across the business Significant lack of diversity & equality across all levels of management The path to success very much depends on your relationship with the CEO and your ability to demonstrate similar values, behaviours & interests One of their values is ´Tell It As It Is´, those that live and are brave enough to express this value are often reprimanded and categorised as someone that is not a ´cultural´ fit Inconsistencies in the way pay rewards and promotions are handled, no transparency or opportunity to apply for roles internally as these are often offered to pre-selected preferred candidates internally

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OpenClassrooms Response
5y
Hi, I highly appreciate that you took the time to tell us about your experience with OpenClassrooms. Thank you for this. I’m very happy to see that during your time at OpenClassrooms you liked and felt embraced by our mission, making education accessible, and that you’ve also appreciated your colleagues. That being said, I will try to answer the rest of your review as accurately as possible. Regarding diversity at OpenClassrooms, here’s some data: - it is inaccurate to say that the team is predominantly made of “white males”. Our team is 46% men versus 54% women, which is quite unique in the French (and European, and global) tech world. Out of our 230 team members around 25% are not French citizens, and come from 20+ countries across the world. - As far as our managers are concerned, it is true that we needed to improve that aspect. As of today, 53% of managers at OpenClassrooms are men, against 47% women; all our recent hires at chief level (chief product officer and chief financial officer) were female, with the firm intention to bring as much balance as possible at leadership level - Because we want to do the right thing, our work council (CSE) has led an anonymous survey about equality and discrimination at OpenClassrooms. Results were quite interesting: while our people didn’t seem to see discriminations in the workplace, they also drew our attention on items: we’re a startup with a predominantly young team, how do we deal with more experienced people? How do we create - and keep - a team as much as possible? As a first step, we’ve launched a series of 10 webinars about diversity and inclusion, for all OpenClassrooms team members. All of our employees without exception have been associated with designing our values and principles and they are constantly asked to bring their thoughts and ideas to make our mission and our culture live and exciting. For example, we’ve recently organized company-wide workshops on our culture; most of the benefits we’ve implemented over the years also stem from ideas submitted by team members . I’m sorry but your statement on internal promotions is not accurate: as a rule, all jobs postings are open to internal applications. This year only, 25% of the new roles we offered were offered to already existing team members, all this while we were growing very strongly. The process to apply is available on our internal knowledge management base and frequently communicated on. And no, promotions do not depend on the person’s relationship with me: we’re a 230+ people company with a strong mission and ambitious development plans. If I had to get personally involved in all recruitment or promotion processes I’d do nothing else! I also do not agree with your statement saying people who speak up are reprimanded. We actually encourage people to provide frequent feedback through monthly anonymous employee engagement surveys, 360° feedback every 6 months, ask-me-anything sessions, and many other channels . Transparency is actually a key characteristic of our culture and often something that comes across as highly distinctive for newcomers. If you feel that your opinion or feedback has not been heard, please send me an email (anonymously or not) and I will make sure to address your concerns, as I am doing so here. I’d like to add that we are currently investing as never before in facilities (our new headquarters office), system and tools (3 new squads being hired to accelerate on product developments), people (more than 100+ new people joining the team in a few months). I’d like to conclude by saying that I wish you would have provided such feedback when you were with us, during our weekly all-hands meetings, by email through askmeanything@openclassrooms.com, through our employee engagement surveys, or just by talking to me, HR, or your manager. I am glad that you did anyway now, and I hope that these answers help you understand where we stand. Finally, I just wanted to thank you for your work with us. We are grateful for your commitment to making education accessible. I wish you all the best with your future endeavors. Thank you again so much, Pierre Dubuc, CEO of OpenClassrooms. pierre.dubuc@openclassrooms.com
1.0
30 Nov 2019

Amateur hour on the French startup scene.

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

You get to meet a lot of people because the turnover rate is so high

Cons

It's as if the French government partnered with Canal+ to create a reality show called "Who wants to be an executive?" CTO, CPO, CSSO, CHRO are the most mediocre leaders I've ever met. Can't trust HR. They are there only to change your contract without telling you.

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OpenClassrooms Response
6y
Hi, we highly appreciate that you took the time to tell us about your experience with OpenClassrooms. As you can understand, we won't answer to personal attacks to our C-level. As for contracts and turnover : - as you may know, we're not allowed to "change contracts without telling you", due to French labor law - our 2019 turnover was 14,8%, which is an average figure in a French tech startup
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Glassdoor has 267 OpenClassrooms reviews submitted anonymously by OpenClassrooms employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if OpenClassrooms is right for you.