Twenty years ago, when corporate universities began cropping up at companies all over the US, chief executives lauded these in-house training centres as the cheaper, more flexible alternative to the professional development courses on offer by business schools.
Today things are different. In an effort to save time and money, many companies with corporate universities are electing to partner with established business schools to help them set up entire programmes, teach particular courses, or simply advise on curriculum.
“Early on in the current corporate university movement, companies viewed setting up a [corporate university] as a way to make proprietary content and do away with business school training programmes,” says Kevin Wheeler, founder and president of Global Learning Resources, a California-based group that helps companies develop corporate leadership programmes.
Over time, however, companies realised that “the go-it-alone approach to running a corporate university was too daunting” a task, he says.
“Companies have realised that they were re-inventing the wheel. Business schools have the credibility, the technology and the content and that can save corporations a lot of time.”
This collaboration on the part of companies and business schools is relatively new. While some corporate universities have been around a long time – GE’s Leadership Center opened in 1956 – most started up in the late 1980s, when companies began looking for a way to use the knowledge and skills of their best employees to sharpen the skills of other workers without having to seek external help.
Today, experts estimate there are more than 2,000 corporate universities in the US – some are centrally located at a headquarters, while others are sprinkled in offices at remote sites or are "virtual" universities, where employees learn via the internet and interactive desktop videoconferencing.
Karen Barley, president of Corporate University Enterprise, an educational consulting firm that works with both private and public organisations, says that company chiefs viewed these internal programmes as the perfect venue to tackle their nitty-gritty business problems. Most viewed the business school setting as too theoretical and slow-paced for their purposes.
“Companies were trying to come up with new ways of training focused on corporate goals,” she says. “They wanted answers to questions like: How do we keep up with competition? How do we turn a profit? How do we keep costs down?”
To a certain extent, corporate universities have fulfilled this promise. Some of the biggest, most important companies in the world – including Oracle, Disney and the McDonald’s Corporation – operate successful, well-respected corporate universities.
Research from Corporate University Xchange, a Pennsylvania-based group that looks at trends in corporate learning, suggests that the increased amount companies spend on corporate universities improves their bottom line. Some experts speculate that the increased training produces superior performance, higher job satisfaction and lower turnover rates.
“As the talent wars begin to heat back up, corporate universities are critical for employee engagement,” says Sue Todd, president of Corporate University Xchange.
“The corporate university is about investing in employees’ learning and development in accordance with a company’s strategic needs.”
Monique Elliott, a marketing manager at GE Capital Solutions, recently attended a 10-day class intended for new managers at GE’s corporate university in Crotonville, New York.
She said the fact that her fellow students were all GE employees – rather than employees of disparate companies – made the experience more rewarding.
“We all speak the same language, and we are comfortable in the GE culture,” says Ms Elliott, who is also a part-time MBA student.
“I knew we were all on the same page and understood the overarching goals of the business.”
GE’s in-house staff teaches most of the classes, but there are often guest lecturers from professors at Harvard Business School and Wharton.
Other companies with corporate universities have also enlisted the help of established business schools.
The main reason for this move toward collaboration is that business schools have “gotten smarter” about how they serve their clients, and have expanded their offerings to include a far richer and more diverse curriculum that corporate universities have difficulty emulating.
“Traditionally, higher education had not thought about servicing the needs of customers,” says Ms Todd, of Corporate University Xchange.
“Business schools focused on management theory; they focused less on application and how things work in the real world. But companies said: we need you to move faster, to be more relevant and to keep up with us. So now business schools are aligning their purposes [with companies].”
Nowadays more and more companies are turning to universities to help them create a custom-designed training programme. “Higher education changed its business model and has started to pay attention to the needs of adult learners,” says Ms Barley, president of Corporate University Enterprise.
“Today, business schools are not competitive [with corporate universities], they’re partners.”
