The Corporate University: Alive and Well
By Sue Todd

We were surprised to hear anyone in the training industry profess that the corporate university model is dead. Because what we’re seeing is just the opposite. We are seeing corporate universities that are growing and expanding in scope as they leverage the best of a variety of learning and development modes, outsourcing partners, and more to contribute to their company’s success.

Corporate universities in agile and successful companies today are finding they can have that meaningful impact on business performance because they:

• Speak the language of business
• Partner with business leaders and take accountability for business results
• Add substantial value in the pursuit of achieving mission-critical objectives.

Senior executive teams who have successful corporate universities are expanding the scope not eliminating them.

And if you haven’t looked at a corporate university for some time – yes – you would be surprised at how much the model has changed. You wouldn’t even recognize it. The old model of the corporate university died years ago.

While the old model of the corporate university borrowed constructs from the academic world with functional colleges, Deans and registrars, the new model looks very much like the structure of a modern corporation (Figure 1).

RUNNING TRAINING “FOR” THE BUSINESS

The mantra that companies should “run training like a business” is being replaced by a more powerful idea – “running training for the business.” Today’s corporate universities are doing just that. They are building credibility with senior executives by abandoning their earlier conversations about e-learning, learning technology, and other L&D issues. These successful learning leaders talk about challenges the organization faces such as:

• achieving its goal for improving Return on Net Assets (RONA),
• pursuing growth through acquisitions and leveraging new capabilities,
• optimizing the supply chain through a global sourcing strategy
• improving customer loyalty by delivering integrated solutions

Today’s corporate universities rely, as did their older counterparts, on a governance structure that includes a governing board comprised of the organization’s most senior leaders and often chaired by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The board’s purpose today is not unlike that of a corporation’s Board of Directors. The governing board shares insights with the corporate university on the organization’s strategic direction. It expects advice, counsel and a comprehensive strategy from the Chief Learning Officer and the corporate university team on how programs will prepare the work force to meet current and future business challenges.

Good enterprise learning strategies no longer focus on providing courses to address learning needs within functional silos. Leading corporate universities work with senior business leaders to understand what it will to take to build new organizational capabilities. For example, they don’t teach science to research scientists.

Instead, the corporate university focuses on helping the scientist understand how to expand his or her capacity to leverage professional knowledge to create new business value and execute the organization strategy. They teach scientists how to move quickly from the theoretical to the practical, to assess commercial viability of an idea, to build relationships in research communities in order to find innovations that can be applied in their industry and within their organization.

In a similar vein, one of the most dramatic changes in the corporate university model, and one most critical to its continued growth and influence, is the emphasis on finding new ways to nurture and develop talented executives. Forward-thinking corporate universities design executive programs that are dynamic, fluid and pragmatic. They expose executives to current thinking on a range of topics that are impacting their industry and their organization. They provide executives with opportunities to develop the insights they need to reshape their organizations, set clear visions, and drive crisp execution.

BORROWING GOOD IDEAS

Corporate universities do create shared services organizations to centralize L&D operations, in the same way that Information Technology (IT) centralized its services to meet the organization’s day-to-day technology operating needs. The services function within the corporate university typically focuses on training operations – the tactical activities of delivering programs and running a training business. These services on their own do not address the strategic needs of the organization. In fact, the overblown claims that e-learning and technology were key to corporate learning actually prevented L&D from speaking the language of business in the early days of the e-learning hype.

Another good idea borrowed from IT is the idea of outsourcing things that aren’t core to the business – especially those transactional pieces that can be done more effectively by others. In many corporate universities, these transactional pieces are the first to be outsourced or given to shared services.

Portfolio management is another concept that forward-looking corporate universities are borrowing from IT. Actually, IT borrowed portfolio management from the investment banking community who used the principles to manage financial assets, and to balance risk and reward. The IT community adopted the concept to more effectively manage technology investments in order to select the projects with the greatest business benefit once adjusted for risk. Corporate universities are now beginning to leverage the same concept to maximize the value of investments in learning and development.

There are differences between IT and learning and development, however, so the analogy can’t be taken too far. There was a presumption, as computers became more powerful, that IT would create competitive advantage, and it did, for a while, to some early adopters. But then the playing field leveled off and IT was simply a commodity to be delivered. People could look at learning in a similar fashion, as “people” and “talent” become key to new competitive advantages. However, good people will never be easily duplicated in the way that organizations copy each other’s technology moves. Today’s best corporate universities understand that.

The science of technology is an exacting one. The science of developing great talent is not. Corporate universities have an exciting future ahead of them, as they design programs to meet the unique challenges of their organizations. And no cookie cutter solution will do.

IT’S HAPPENING NOW

The ideas described here about focusing on business performance, partnering with business leaders, and creating learning environments that address new modes of doing work in the organization are practices already in place at leading corporations like Caterpillar, UBS, Intel, Boeing, Cisco and many others. We are also seeing these ideas take root in a number of organizations who are just developing or operating new corporate universities, including Air Products, Sutter Health, Textron, M&M Mars, SABIC, Coast Capital and others.

The corporate university is far from dead. In fact, given the importance placed on people as a source of competitive advantage, it is a living, breathing, and, by extension, ever-changing contributor to the success of their organizations – and will continue to be so for a long time.

Reprinted from Corporate University Xchange

Sue Todd is President of Corporate University Xchange