Firms study online

By SELWYN PARKER

That dreaded answerphone message, "I am unable to take your call because I am away at a conference all week," is under threat.

That is because employees of organisations, big and small, are doing more of their study in-house at their own corporate universities and less of it away at conferences.

For example, Unitec's business faculty delivers customised learning right to the door of numerous companies.

Faculty staff teach process management to Tip-Top Ice Cream in Mt Wellington, management skills to brewery technicians for DB Breweries as far afield as Timaru and Mangatainoka, leadership to professional accountancy firms and project management skills to Air New Zealand personnel.

"We wanted to get closer to industry," says faculty dean Gael McDonald. "Also, we needed to make money and become less dependent on public funds."

So it is the institution that comes to you, and, Unitec is going a step further as a contractor of management and commercial knowledge.

Its business faculty has started to design, cost and manage further-learning packages according to demand, even if it means hiring teaching staff from elsewhere.

"We've become brokers of corporate learning," Professor McDonald said.

Other bricks and mortar universities are following suit. Auckland University and Auckland University of Technology have signed with overseas institutions to offer courses than can be packaged for individual companies.

Corporate universities are far from new - General Electric established one as long ago as 1956 - but their numbers have boomed in the past couple of years mainly because of four phenomena.

Whirlwind changes in the technological and commercial landscape forced companies to take special measures to keep up with the play.

Online learning has made in-house programmes much easier to implement because people can work at their own pace.

The boom in global mergers has forced managers to find methods of instruction that transcend commercial cultures and countries.

In a commercial culture where training is practically continuous, employees seek out companies with prestigious advanced learning programmes.

Organisations do not want general, off-the-shelf courses any more. They want proprietary knowledge that gives them the competitive edge .

The United States alone claims 1600 corporate universities, the biggest one run by IBM, with 10,000 courses a year.

Nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies have their own universities and spend an average $US17 million ($37 million) a year on them. A lot of these corporate universities stretch the meaning of the word to the ultimate, some of them being little more than training programmes.

And we are not counting the fast-food chain McDonald's tongue-in-cheek Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Illinois, with its two-week course in "hamburger-ology," or Dunkin Donuts University in Braintree, Massachusetts, with its five-week training programme for new doughnut-shop managers.

But the race to establish purpose-designed, company-specific learning programmes is worldwide.

In Germany, Lufthansa founded its own university in 1998 while DaimlerChrysler and the media company Bertelsmann and Metallgesellshaft followed soon after.

"We want to get our managers accustomed to life-long learning," a Bertelsmann director told Der Spiegel magazine.

In Europe, most of the big corporate universities contract the content out to prestige bricks and mortar institutions. Lufthansa has Britain's Cranfield School of Management to put together its purpose-designed programmes and Bertelsmann works with Harvard Business School.

More small companies are establishing their own mini-universities by harnessing online technology and contracting local academic staff.

Unitel, a call-centre firm in McLean, Virginia, established Unitel University in 1997.

Although this is not exactly Harvard, Unitel does its best. Students are "freshmen" and"sophomores" and so on as though it is a full-blown tertiary institute, and if you turn up late twice you go to the bottom of the class and start the course again.

Every 90 days, Unitel employees can take increasingly advanced courses. If they pass, they are eligible for pay rises of up to 8 per cent. It seems to work. Within two years of opening its "university," staff turnover at Unitel dropped by half - from 12 per cent a month to 6 per cent.

Lower staff turnover certainly saves costs but nearly all companies say corporate universities, especially those with a lot of online teaching, are cheaper in other ways than the programmes they have replaced.

Travel costs generally plummet when courses are delivered online.

However, online learning has its critics.

They point out that it is by definition impersonal and that it is important to have a live teacher, at least occasionally.

Also, collegial classroom-type learning can stoke the ferment of ideas and boost the company culture in ways that soundbite-type, computer-based learning cannot.

Still, somewhere nearby there is a university ready to come to you.

* Selwyn Parker is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz