Learn Assembly Put Learning Companies in The Spotlight: Pollen

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How was Pollen born?

Pollen is the result of a meeting between three entrepreneurs. Just over nine months old, the start-up was founded by Julie Ranty, former CEO and member of the VivaTech founding team, Olivier Xu, co-founder of Kudoz and former GM of Bulb, with the active support of Vincent Huguet, co-founder of Malt.

Pollen’ s ambition was born of 3 simple observations:

Today, skills become obsolete in 18 to 24 months, compared with 30 years in 1987. To remain competitive and continue to innovate, it is essential to constantly update them. To do this, learning from peers, from current operational staff who are in touch with reality and are breaking new ground in their field, is the most effective way.

At the same time, companies are counting talent retention among their key challenges. According to a report by Team and MassChallenge in 2022, talent development has been identified as the most important lever of corporate loyalty.

Finally, the post-Covid context, combined with economic and political instability, has strengthened the need to reconnect with others, share experiences, exchange ideas and meet new people.

By building its vision and instructional approach on this new situation, Pollen aims to reinvent professional learning and encourage the acquisition of skills that will be useful in building tomorrow’s world.

What is your learning approach?

We design our learning programs to inspire action. Above all, we want them to be useful and actionable. They must enable each participant to leave with a concrete action plan and tools and resources to implement it.

We select the most experienced professionals in their field and train them to share their methods, best practices and mistakes. We’re convinced that there’s no better advice than that given by experts who are out in the field every day, mastering their topics.

We also try to think of all our learning programs as real experiences: live, shared, collective, encounters and inspiration are at the heart of the Pollen promise.

We use the RAISE methodology we have developed with leading experts in active learning, centered on 5 key principles: Rhythmic, Actionable, Insight-led, Shared, Empathic.

We organize our sessions around 3 key moments:

1. Experience-sharing: which values exchange between each participant, feedback and the trainer’s vision.
2. Practice: these methods are applied and tested by the learners: through practical cases, decoding, case studies that can be created according to the company’s needs, role-playing and feedback.
3. Theory: our experts share their “secret sauce”. Their techniques and proven methods that have enabled them to succeed in their business.

What does Pollen offer?

The Pollen offering, aimed at both large companies and startups, is organized around three dimensions:

1. Individual places, to meet employees’ specific needs. They are available from the entire Pollen catalog, with over 60 learning programs on 7 different topics. These one-day or half-day sessions are conducted face-to-face and in small groups of 12 people maximum. People can learn alongside their peers from other companies.
2. Seating packs, to give teams access to the best experts and build a real learning cycle. These packs can be used to roll out high-potential programs and/or support our customers on a pre-defined learning theme. The offer includes personalized follow-up by one of our consultants, and access to the Pollen Hub (our turnkey solution developed to support managers and HR in tracking their learning programs).
3. Private, customizable sessions for our customers who want to unite their internal talent pool and co-build around their strategic challenges. Masterclasses, half-day or full-day sessions, learning weeks, always in-person, in French or English.

We have the pleasure of supporting customers such as L’Oréal, Carrefour, Pennylane, Akur8, Malt and Fabriq, always with the aim of enabling them to offer their talents engaging and actionable learning experiences.

How far have you got? What are your next steps?

Pollen is now just over 9 months old. The company has a team of 11 talented people who are passionate about passing on knowledge. We have a 4.82/5 satisfaction rate from our learners (over 1000 to date!), which has enabled us to validate our methodology and approach to learning. We are very proud to support our customers in their learning needs, and we learn every day from their feedback on their priority topics. But we still have a long way to go: the market is huge and demand is growing all the time.

We currently have over 60 inter-company learning programs on 7 themes (Management, Sales, Marketing, Impact, Product and Design, Data and AI, Tech). We’re continuing to expand our offer, particularly in the areas of AI and soft skills, while remaining particularly selective about the trainers who join our community. We offer an ever-increasing variety of formats (Masterclasses, customized sessions, private events, multi-day programs for cohorts of hundreds of employees).

We aim to deliver the most impactful product experience for our customers, before, during and after the session. We recently launched the creation of a learner’s space to extend the experience after training, enabling our community to access exclusive content and continue exchanging to progress together. We regularly enhance Pollen Hub with new features to make session booking and follow-up as complete and accessible as possible, with a measurable ROI for our HR partners.

Last but not least, we’re expanding our community outreach following the excellent response to our first exclusive events, such as :

• Pollen Master Sessions with inspirational leaders. We had the pleasure of opening this cycle with Maurice Lévy, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis Groupe.
• An HR club organized around the theme of “artificial intelligence for talent development”.
• Live online masterclass cycles with our partner Act for Impact, to support the development of impact companies.

And we’ve got 1,000 more ideas for how we can continue to promote the sharing of skills that are essential to building the future of our companies!

Learn Assembly is a hybrid consulting firm created in 2013 to support the transformation of all those involved in learning and employment. Our mission is to help them play a strategic role in their organizations to meet the challenges of skills in a context of environmental transition and technological transformation. We support the general management and L&D departments of major groups, public bodies and higher education institutions in their strategic development.