Digital Companies Facing the Challenges of Skill Adaptation: A Quantitative Analysis of the Uses of Training in France

Digital companies operate in a highly competitive environment where rapid technological change is transforming the market, products and structures. To adapt to this competition, companies must generate rare skills and costly innovation creation processes. Rapid change requires a very strong internal dynamic of adaptation that can also be adapted to external collaborations. Knowledge management and cooperation is therefore a very strong challenge that requires transforming individual knowledge into collective knowledge, and academic knowledge into tacit knowledge. To achieve this objective, which concerns the high level of individual qualification, the transfer and operationality of knowledge, recruitment and training are at the core of a management strategy. Given the diversity of the challenges, companies use a wide range of training methods (formal, non-formal and informal) and integration practices of recruits into the collectives (mainly tutoring). All these practices are compatible with the collective's objectives of enhancing (internal and external) collaboration, maintaining operationality and acquiring rare knowledge. The French training and employee trajectory surveys (dispositif d’enquêtes sur les formations et itinéraires de salaries/Defis), which provides information on companies' internal organizations, recruitment and training methods, allows a very broad analysis of digital companies. They make it possible both to reflect the importance of these practices in relation to the rest of the economy and to test our hypothesis of the impact of the innovation factor on recruitment and training methods. Finally, this impact study is completed by contextual factors such as market territoriality, growth and integration into networks or groups of companies.