SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
It's Academic: Training Partnerships
May 01, 2008
Partnering with a college or university can bring additional expertise to training programs or help companies tailor a master's degree program to their needs.
By Dan Calabrese
Looking to beef up your corporate university offerings or to compensate for the lack of a corporate university? One solution may be partnering with a college or university. A growing number of such academic institutions now customize educational experiences—from task-specific training initiatives to full-fledged master's programs—to suit the needs of specific companies.
Corporate training programs offered by universities are becoming more common for several reasons. For the corporations that use them, the programs represent an opportunity for specialized training from someone with a valuable outside perspective—without the need to put additional trainers on the payroll or divert existing internal resources. For the universities, the programs represent an opportunity to boost enrollment, earn additional revenue, and extend their reach and influence into the business community.
Extension Expertise
Sandra A. Clark, director of corporate training and outreach at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) Extension in Silicon Valley, says her program is attractive to many companies because it mainly uses professionals who work full-time in the fields for which they offer training. "Extensions in general—and that includes my campus—rarely use campus faculty for a variety of reasons," Clark notes. "Our clients want people who are working in the field in which they teach. They don't want theory. They want someone who can say, 'When the project I was working on went wrong, this is how we fixed it.'"
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc. chose the UCSC Extension program for several different training needs because it had specific advantages over private training firms, according to Dr. Ellen Pieterse, director of global learning and leadership and organizational development for the San Jose-based company. "We find it is more cost-effective to outsource for this service than to have in-house facilitation expertise in these areas," Pieterse says. "UCSC Extension was able to provide expert facilitators experienced in the fields of project management and Mandarin."
While customization in the Hitachi program was kept to a minimum, Pieterse says the UCSC Extension trainers made sure they put together a program that met Hitachi's needs, including the tailoring of class materials to employees’ expectations.
For Tony Rogers, senior manager of engineering at Cisco Systems Inc., his company's own expertise in the field of information technology can make it difficult to find a good training fit. Who is going to teach Cisco about IT? The key for him is to believe the trainers at UCSC can offer a perspective his own people may not get otherwise.
"It affords us the opportunity to get a fresh perspective, because UCSC is connected to the future engineers of Silicon Valley," Rogers says. "There's that awareness of the latest goings-on. It would be a little presumptuous of us, even Cisco, to think we can drive all the new innovations with the folks we currently have. UCSC is exposed to the new blood that’s developing many of the solutions."
Cisco currently runs a monthly program with UCSC designed to "upscale" the company's future managers and senior managers with a focus on engineering skills. "A private firm or something on the Web may be a turnkey solution," Rogers says. "There are thousands out there. But to dial in this program to be Cisco-specific is something UCSC is open to working with us on."
Branching Out
Johnson Controls Inc. (JCI), a Milwaukee-based manufacturer of automotive systems and nonresidential climate control systems, found itself reaching out for a university partner about 10 years ago when a growing contingent from among its Holland, MI-based engineering team expressed an interest in pursuing master's degrees—and started beating the bushes for the best place to get them.
That led Matt Roddamer, in his capacity as director of the company's Leadership Institute, to get involved and develop a partnership with Kalamazoo, MI-based Western Michigan University. "(WMU) immediately expressed an interest," Roddamer says. "So we looked at its master's in engineering management curriculum. The university allowed us to look at all the courses it offered, so it would be more tailored to our environment. From that point, we solicited for interest in the company, and were bowled over by the response. From that point forward, we’ve had on-site classes at our campus."
Even though the courses are located at JCI's Holland facility—some 30 miles from WMU's main campus in Kalamazoo—they are all taught by full-time WMU faculty. JCI reimburses employees for tuition through its normal tuition reimbursement program, meaning the employees pay up front and then put in to be paid back.
The program is a first of its kind for the university, says David Lyth, a WMU engineering professor who oversees the partnership with JCI, but it has worked because it plays on WMU's strengths. "We've had a plastics presence here for 25 years," Lyth says. "So our approach was to take particular coursework that suited JCI's needs, but also make sure the topical content fit its needs within a particular class."
The program has become so popular that WMU and JCI recently agreed to open it up to other members of the Holland community—allowing them to come to the JCI facility and take their WMU master's courses alongside JCI employees. "At a certain point, you reach a saturation point with your own population, and our workforce isn't growing like it was 10 years ago," Roddamer says. "In fact, it's shrinking."
Bringing in outsiders, both parties agreed, would add to the educational environment and help JCI employees adjust to the classroom mind-set they needed by creating less of a sense that they are "at work" when they are supposed to feel like they're at school.
Leveraging Strengths
At Kennesaw, GA-based Kennesaw State University, programs have a heavy emphasis on leadership training, which is a strength of the program's director, Julie Crews, who also consults on leadership issues independent of her university position. "The majority of the training, if we're taking it out to the corporation, is around conflict relations, customer service, and communication skills," Crews says. "Every corporation has a different climate, and our approach largely depends on the size of the group. I don't like to work with more than 20 in a group, because that becomes more of a speaking engagement."
University officials indicate they prefer to start with their existing programs, then add customization as needed to meet companies' individual needs, as opposed to just customizing everything from scratch. But what a corporate client needs, universities increasingly are willing to provide if they possibly can.
And that's good news for companies, employees, and training professionals.
Sidebar: Quick Tips
For a successful training program between a university and a corporation:
• Decide if the best environment for employee training is at work or off-site on the university's campus. While onsite training has obvious advantages, it sometimes can be difficult for employees to get into a training frame of mind if they're in the same physical environment where they work every day.
• Determine if existing programs offered to the public will meet your training needs. There's no point in paying for customization if you don't need to.
• Choose a flexible partner. For example, will a university make adjustments to study materials to better suit your employees' needs? The idea is not to reinvent the wheel, but to be willing to make necessary adjustments so the program will work for you.
• Limit the size of training groups if possible, so the effort doesn't devolve into a series of impersonal lectures.
• Evaluate the advancement opportunities within your company before you embark upon an ambitious training program. What happens if you pay for 50 employees to get master's degrees, but you don't have advancement opportunities available for 50 MBAs? You might have just paid to train your competition.
• Consider which kind of trainer would best suit your needs. Do you want a full-time engineering professor, or a full-time engineer, for example? The latter is more likely to be available from a university extension or certain private universities that rely heavily on adjunct professors. The former is more likely to be available from an establishment-type, state school.
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Training Index |
|
|
