Getting an Education in the Workplace
How Corporate Universities Deliver Learning to Employees
Jul 11, 2009
Businesses are well aware that human capital is as valuable as other assets of the business, hence the need to preserve and capture their skills and expertise and make it an accessible inventory to the rest of the workforce. Conceptually, it is what's called corporate knowledge.
The vexing problem, however, is knowledge resides in many heads. Thus the critical challenge to organizations is twofold: 1) how to effectively capture the experience, specialized skills,and implicit knowledge from employees; 2) how to transmit and share captured knowledge to help develop and sharpen others.
Enter corporate universities. Each corporate university is designed with its own distinct learning structure and reason for its existence. Some have evolved from simple training sections of the HR department, while others rose from conscious efforts of leaders who recognized the benefits of having a dedicated framework for workplace education.
So, what are these structural models and orientations that underpin the purposes and intentions of a corporate university? Here's a broad brush description.
Learning Organization
A learning organization traces its roots to the culture of the enterprise. Peter Senge, in his seminal work, The Fifth Discipline [Broadway Business, 2006] characterizes a learning organization as possessing critical elements that supports workplace learning. Corporate universities born out of this model tend to be holistic in their view of learning and exhaustive in their design.
The elements consist of executive level support, internal resources, and rewards for performance improvement. He also enumerated critical personal behaviors such as self-mastery, paradigm shift, and systems thinking as necessary factors for their development and how those behaviors need to be synchronized with business objectives.
Essentially, a learning organization suggests the predominance of a collective mindset that advocates the education of its workers. This implies that management consciously and actively establishes policies, methods, and resources for employees to learn. A key feature is the collective effort given to the learning experience.
Knowledge Management
Corporate universities, grounded on knowledge management, are driven to capture both implicit and explicit learning of their employees. One overriding quality is the use of analytics and dashboard data analysis. Workers become partners to the usage and gathering of data, which in turn are shared with all those concerned so they can do their jobs better and help grow the business.
Intentionally or not, their efforts lead toward developing so-called knowledge workers.These people operate in an environment that empowers them to perform within the context of creativity, risk, and eye for data analysis. They work in cross functional teams and inter-departments where their expertise may be needed, and then move on to other work projects.
Corporate schools that emphasize knowledge management develop workers that are highly aware of how their work outputs are transformed from raw data, through actionable information, and on to practical knowledge.
Professional Development
Organizations that focus on continuing education to keep their company's competitive edge look to methods and practices that sharpen the skills of their workers and ways that ensure their professional career paths. Instead of employees scrambling to relearn old theories and concepts about their work, they creatively retool themselves through the help of on -demand courses and incentivized credentialing offered by their organization.
One learning portal that is constantly receiving accolades is John Muir Health- HR Intranet – an internal, localized information network designed to enskill, support, and improve the performance of hospital employees. This Walnut Creek, CA - based health provider is driven by a mission to hire and keep high-performing workforce through up-to-date training programs.
Business Improvement
The centerpiece of this model is aligning educational initiatives with clearly described business objectives. The idea of corporate education covers not just employees, but more so, other critical stakeholders including customers, vendors, and external consultants.
One classic example of a corporate university pinpointedly aimed at its business interests is Von Roll Corporate University. In addition to its face-to-face sessions, it offers e-learning classes for its customers and own employees. Their drive is to be on top of business solutions and learning initiatives that create competitive advantages for the organization.
Hence as much as a corporate university may manifest a slant toward a specific model or structure based on its core business goals and strategies, it must exhibit a healthy blend of features from other models in order to hold credibility and live up to its distinction as a reputable knowledge-generating enterprise.
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