Mark van Achter

Background

About Mark van Achter

My passion and expertise are on the future-proof interface between Finance, HRM and AI. I invent, develop and market human-centered innovative HR Tech solutions. With “Strides”, I launched a world-pioneering learning tool uniquely allowing to make soft skills tangible. A one-hour gaming session yields an automated report on the individual members’ contributions and the way they effectively interact. Strides is currently actively used by several large-scale companies to gamify the employee experience (and have both the employer and employees learn from it). Applied use cases include recruiting & pre/onboarding young graduates, evaluating and reskilling high potentials, team-based learning on individual soft skills, DEI awareness and leadership training. Strides fosters an innovative learning culture in the entire organization, thus raising engagement and retention. At KU Leuven, my research explores the impact of human capital (quantified in gaming data) on a company’s financial performance. Moreover, I am running valorization projects on soft skills to resolve open questions in business practice by gathering the huge array of available university expertise in Finance, HRM and AI. These include a project to efficiently capture company culture in the recruiting process using a top-down/bottom-up AI approach, and a project focused on quantifying the value of human/AI cooperation and facilitating the implementation of AI. Throughout, my angle is to to envisage the employee in his/her new role: the “critical reflector” when faced with AI-produced outcomes. On the educational front within KU Leuven, I am committed to improve the job match of our university graduates. By increasing their exposure to a larger spectrum of future employers. And by having them reflect more on their professional profile and soft skills, an area which thus far remains largely unexplored in our academic programs. I develop alternative methodologies in this direction, which I apply in my career development courses.