Title: Forging Partnerships with Institutions of Higher Education
Abstract: Corporate Universities: Lessons in Building a World-Class Work Force The advent of the corporate university has redefined the relationship between business and education. As Christopher Galvin, President and CEO of Motorola, said to a recent gathering of The American Society of Engineering Education, Motorola no longer wants to hire engineers with a four year Instead, we want our employees to have a 40 year degree. An employee now must expect to continually reinvent his/her knowledge base. Increasingly, learning and work are becoming the same thing and they are happening in the workplace rather than in the classroom. As the pace of change increases with the introduction of deregulation, competitive pressures and technological advances, corporations wilt increasingly become the chief educators of the work force. Because the job of continuously updating an employee's knowledge base is so large, corporate universities are joining forces with conventional universities and merging the goals of the individual employee, the corporation and the educational institution into one mutually beneficial three-way partnership. While the business community has traditionally invested significant sums of money in the local schools and universities, much of this investment has been piecemeal. Companies have recruited college graduates, depended on higher education to carry out basic research, reimbursed employees for college tuition, and sent managers to university-run executive education open enrollment, programs. While these piecemeal efforts have endured, business has become frustrated by its inability to increase on-the-job performance in the workplace. The new partnership between business and higher education is, by contrast, proactively involved in making sure the skill needs of tomorrow's work force are met. For example, rather than simply giving a list of requirements to higher education, businesses are now spelling out the specific skills, knowledge and competencies needed for success in an industry and in the process creating joint, accredited degree programs. We have developed a model for how corporations can build these state-of-the-art learning partnerships, with lessons in how various companies have entered into and sustained these alliances. The basic process for building an alliance with an institution of higher education is shown in the Figure above. The key starting point is for both the corporate university and the institution of higher education to openly discuss and develop a shared vision for the alliance. In successful collaborative partnerships no one organization dominates the effort or defines the goals and outcomes unilaterally. Instead, both sides take the time to develop a shared vision of how a successful partnership operates in terms of expectations, processes, outcomes, and support systems. Creating this type of shared vision usually starts with a review of the strategic rationale for creating the alliance and an articulation of the various selection criteria in choosing the learning partner, While specific selection criteria differ by institution, the following list of criteria is relatively comprehensive, compiled by interviews with scores of corporate university deans, and can be used as a guide to help articulate specific criteria for selecting a learning partner. These criteria include: 1. Shared mindset where customer service, innovation, and continuous improvement are paramount to success. 2. Clear expectations for setting learning objectives and developing courses. 3. Flexibility and responsiveness in building a corporate/college alliance (this may include teaching on site, sharing libraries, laboratories or equipment). 4. Complementary needs and goals. This may range from funding joint research to developing customized executive education programs. 5. Reputation and prestige of the educational institution. …
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 7
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