Case study: an effective system to help the accounting profession transform (1/2)

e-Coll, a demanding training course for the digital transformation of the accounting profession

Imagine that you have just learned that 40,000 to 60,000 jobs are going to disappear in your profession: how would you react? This is what is likely to happen to employees of accounting firms, faced with the increasing automation of production tasks. The most affected, as usual, will be the bac+2/3, responsible for traditional missions that have not evolved in decades.

Fatality? No, because there are solutions. Not to replace employees with geeks, but to improve the skills of today's employees, to save jobs and allow accountants to take charge of their future.

Train accountants in new activities for a sustainable increase in skills

To keep their place, tomorrow's employees will have to bring new added value to their customers. Beyond accounting entry, they will be in a position to support small business managers on a daily basis in the management of their business. It is with this in mind that ASFOREF, the training institute of the Ordre des Experts-Comptables Paris-Ile-de-France, called on Didask and the Pluriel Consultants firm to design e-coll, a demanding training course for the transformation of the accounting profession. The objective: the real and sustainable development of employees in skills. 

There was no time to lose. When jobs are at stake, doing “classical” training where you listen to a speaker speak for a day before returning to daily life is not enough. Concrete learning outcomes were needed in order to truly change work attitudes.

Rethinking the training path around pedagogical effectiveness

To be effective, this course not only had to give pride of place to practice (see our article on the testing effect), but also intelligently space out the learning sessions. In fact, research in cognitive science demonstrate that you remember what you learn better when work sessions are distributed over time than when they are massed over a single day (See our article on the spacing effect).

Faced with this challenge, the option chosen was to design a hybrid face-to-face and distance learning system from A to Z, where online moments on the Didask platform and moments of face-to-face exchanges would be distributed over time in the most relevant way.

Offer a module in three stages: remote, face-to-face, then back to remote

The course was first divided into five modules of gradual transformation:

• adapt to the changing world;
• rethinking the traditional mission;
• decipher the activity and performance of the company;
• analyze the financial balance and cash flow of the company;
• support the manager in the management of his business.

Then, three main steps were identified by theme, each with specific objectives:

Learning first through exercise for a more successful day of face-to-face training

Concretely, learners who wish to register for the training are divided into groups of 15 to 20 people. Each module coincides with a face-to-face day. Before the in-person day, the learners of the group are invited to follow the corresponding map on Didask. A card consists of approximately 8 skills, i.e. 8 work sessions per exercise of approximately 20 minutes each. Only learners who have validated the entire card on Didask can attend the face-to-face day. To ensure the engagement of participants, learners are relaunched in a personalized manner one week, 3 days, and 24 hours before the classroom.

So, When learners arrive at the training, they already understand the basics. This mastery of the issues is particularly striking when the facilitators ask the learners to formulate their expectations for the training during the first round of the table. For example, after validating the map entitled “adapting to the changing world”, the learners had already diagnosed the impact of automation on accounting production tasks, and were spontaneously wondering about ways to better support their customers in the future.

Such a format therefore allows learners to: confront directly the practical consequences of apprenticeships for their work. The training day becomes a session for exchanges and group work, rather than passive transmission of content. The learners' feedback also highlights the interactive nature of the training day.

“For once we don't read transparencies all day long that make us fall asleep”
A participant

“Finally a day of training where you feel like you have learned something! ”
A participant

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Repractice your skills three weeks later for better consolidate In time

But learning better through practice is not enough: Learning must also be anchored in the long term. This is why, three weeks after the face-to-face training, learners come back to Didask to consolidate their knowledge by working on exercises based on the skills developed during the training.

Unlike initial training on Didask, which is granularized by micro-skills, post-face-to-face work sessions mobilize several skills at the same time. Just like in real life situations, learners must be able to mobilize the right skills at the right time. This is the principle of intermingling (Interleaving (in English): if we take the case of a tennis player, the research in cognitive science tends to show that he will get better results if he practices alternating forehand and backhand on 500 balls than if he plays 250 balls in forehand, then 250 balls in reverse. For accountants, this may mean, for example, that they must master both the impacts of the digital transition on firms and the new expectations of clients.

Our training proposes to train different skills simultaneously to guarantee this intermingling. In the end, the overall training pattern is as follows:

We were able to see how, to meet the need for increased skills of employees of accounting firms, Didask and Pluriel Consultants have together designed a comprehensive training course whose progress guarantees effective learning. However, to have a long-term impact, even a well-structured training system requires an equally thorough consideration of the sequencing and the form of the educational content itself. This will be the subject of the second part of this article.

See the rest of the case study: Accounting profession: the method used to create modules that meet the specific needs of the profession