Spotlight On: Mehdi Tounsi from OpenSesame

We caught up with Mehdi Tounsi, Senior Regional Director at EdTech company OpenSesame, to interview him about the upcoming year for L&D, challenges on the horizon, technological advances, and what inspires him the most about learning tech! Give it a read!

At Speexx Exchange in December 2021, one of the speakers, Jeremy Blain, put it nicely – he talked about “power skills” instead of “soft skills”.

I see four main trends:

The first one is adaptability, which involves helping people adapt to an ever-changing work and life landscape and giving them the tools to help them really adapt to that. Some might argue that this is a form of change management, as well.

The second one, which is tied to the first, is collaboration — our ability to be able to work with others, especially because now collaboration with others is a blended skill. It’s no longer around the water cooler or the coffee machine; it needs to be done with a hybrid approach. Having the ability to collaborate on both fronts, whether it’s virtual or physical, is becoming a key skill.

The third trend is around having a growth mindset — how do you keep positive; how do you maintain the ability to see the glass half full despite all that’s been happening and what could happen in the coming months?

It’s about keeping your employees focused on the prize and helping them to see the opportunities ahead of them. It’s also about encouraging them to be an “active actor” in their work lives, versus just a passive spectator. I think that’s especially important.

The fourth, and the most important, is supporting an environment of “learning to learn.” We have inherited a workplace and a culture where, for too long, learning in education systems force feed knowledge, rather than teaching how to learn. As a result, we have workplaces where changes occur at a pace too fast for most to keep up with.

You will hear terms like “upskilling” and “reskilling”, but these are down to your ability to adapt and learn. It’s crucial to put the emphasis on the “learning” aspect, as this has been missing. How do we allow our people to learn? How do we allow that process of making mistakes, being able to learn from those mistakes and then acquiring that knowledge and methodology to be able to move on and embed that new piece of information into our workflow? I am seeing a clear focus on that.
Those would be the four main trends of focus for 2022. Then, of course, there is the technological aspect where we will see a lot more AR and VR driven concepts.