Odile Asselin, Head of the Learn­ing Tech­nolo­gies Project with ResMed, accepts new chal­lenges as she progresses. 

Odile Asselin was attract­ed by and admit­ted to UTC after her Bac­calau­re­ate. She grad­u­at­ed in 1989 with the major Bio-Engi­neer­ing and the elec­tive spe­cial­ty Bio­log­i­cal Food­stuff Prod­ucts (PBA). “I real­ly felt fine at UTC, which turned out to be an engi­neer­ing school that cor­re­spond­ed exact­ly to my expec­ta­tions! I was inter­est­ed in new tech­nolo­gies applied to the liv­ing spheres, to health prob­lems and at the time, UTC was the only engi­neer­ing school with sub­jects like that on its train­ing cur­sus. The rel­a­tive­ly long place­ments with enter­prise and the pos­si­bil­i­ty to car­ry out semes­ters abroad were also ‘not to be missed’ oppor­tu­ni­ties. With hind­sight, what struck me was that UTC was a great place to get one’s act togeth­er, with the open choice of cours­es and elec­tive spe­cial­ty”, Odile recalls. At the end of her last semes­ter at UTC, Odile, who want­ed to com­plete her tech­ni­cal train­ing back­ground with ground­ings in mar­ket­ing and finance, reg­is­tered for a Master’s degree at the ESSEC Busi­ness School [one of the best in Europe]. 

Find­ing her way

With her two HE diplo­mas, Odile start­ed to work in jobs with strong rela­tion­ship poten­tial. First­ly, with Dositek, a small biotech­nol­o­gy-inten­sive start-up, where she devel­oped com­pa­ny-client rela­tion­ships. She then joined INTEGRA Bio­sciences, a Ger­man-Swiss com­pa­ny, as a tech­ni­co-com­mer­cial engi­neer, the com­pa­ny doing very well in France, rid­ing, so to speak, the new tech­nol­o­gy wave. “I love chal­lenges with the idea of being able to inte­grate some very inno­v­a­tive prod­ucts to the French mar­ket-place with research labs as my clients”. In 1999, a new post­ing and new func­tions saw her at Elvetec Ser­vices, Head­ing their Mar­ket­ing Depart­ment. She was kept busy with Sales, Prod­uct range man­age­ment, Event-ori­ent­ed activ­i­ties and the Med­ical biol­o­gy lab scene as her market-place.

At the patients’ service

5 years down her career path, Odile was recruit­ed as Prod­uct Man­ag­er for ResMed. As of this point, Odile Asselin engaged in a strong career route with ResMed, a spe­cial­ist in sleep phase res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­or­ders. Prof­it­ing from her pri­or expe­ri­ence in mar­ket­ing, she shift­ed to the train­ing aspects as Head of an e‑learning project: “I had the impres­sion that I had accom­plished lots of things and I want­ed to face a new chal­lenge, open­ing new doors so I accept­ed to start this project from scratch since at that time there was no dis­tant learn­ing pro­to­col to hand”. Inter­est­ed as she was in man­ag­ing com­plex projects, Odile par­tic­i­pat­ed in dis­sem­i­na­tion of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge: “Beyond prod­uct train­ing, the aim was to share clin­i­cal knowl­edge relat­ed to the sleep syn­dromes and patholo­gies. For exam­ple, we devel­oped mod­els with vir­tu­al patients, employ­ing tech­niques sim­i­lar to those used by the armed forces and the air-force and some uni­ver­si­ty and hos­pi­tals are anx­ious to access our pro­to­cols!” Her train­ing course in e‑learning received the Peter Farell Award, 2013 [ed.note: founder of ResMed] “This is a prize that val­oris­es inno­va­tion and is also a recog­ni­tion of a team’s achieve­ments with an inter­na­tion­al project that will enable us to share our know-how in the field with our clients!” In 2014, con­tin­u­ing to pur­sue her per­son­al aims and always on the look­out for new chal­lenges, Odile was appoint­ed head of the Learn­ing Tech­nolo­gies Project, notably with the Euro­pean mar­ket-places in mind. “After work­ing on the con­tents, we had to devel­op and deploy the dis­sem­i­na­tion plat­forms. I can­not stress enough the val­ue of hav­ing done mar­ket­ing and dig­i­tal pro­cess­ing before­hand”, she insists. 

Con­stant­ly call­ing one­self to question

With each new func­tion, Odile also aimed at call­ing her­self to ques­tion. This implied a great deal of ener­gy and dynam­ics that she per­son­al­ly invests to cre­ate new projects and explore new hori­zons. “The evo­lu­tion here is nat­ur­al, inas­much as the posts I held did not exist before I was offered them. What I enjoy intense­ly is to accept a new mis­sion and to move on with it. It is very encour­ag­ing and pleas­ant to hear pos­i­tive tes­ti­mo­ny from peo­ple who feel bet­ter thanks to our equip­ment. That, I sup­pose, ties in with my desire to be use­ful!” Her dual edu­ca­tion­al back­ground, a blend of engi­neer­ing and mar­ket­ing allowed Odie to make the dif­fer­ence. “UTC made me quite prag­mat­ic in my ways. I think that all engi­neer­ing grad­u­ates pos­sess a high capac­i­ty to inno­vate and for me the dri­ving force was to be able to com­mit myself to some­thing that real­ly ben­e­fit­ted Soci­ety. In terms of employ­ment, the ‘con­nect­ed health’ con­cept, just like remote (e-) train­ing schemes are tak­ing off now and are full of promise. What we have here is a way for­ward that will make patients feel they are bet­ter cared for”, con­cludes Odile.

Bio express

1986

Admis­sion to UTC 

1989

Grad­u­at­ed with the major GB (bio-engi­neer­ing) and the elec­tive spe­cial­ty Bio­log­i­cal Food­stuff Prod­ucts (PBA)

1990

Master’s degree from ESSEC – IGIA (the Insti­tute for inter­na­tion­al agro-food management) 

1991

Sales and Client Man­ag­er at Dositek 

1993 Tech­ni­co-com­mer­cial engi­neer with INTEGRA Biosciences

1999

Head of the Mar­ket­ing Depart­ment at Elvetec Services 

2005

Head of PPC Prod­ucts at ResMed 

2009

Head of the e‑learning project at ResMed 

2014

Head of the Learn­ing Tech­nolo­gies LMS Project at ResMed