A dual focus on business strategy and employee engagement can ensure a corporate university’s guiding principles align with those of the company.

The first corporate universities were created more than 60 years ago as a place for employees to learn in conjunction with the company’s vision and business goals. General Electric’s Crotonville started in the mid-1950s, McDonald’s Hamburger University opened its doors in 1961, and Disney University and Motorola University debuted in the ’70s. They became more widespread and prominent in the ’80s and ’90s and quickly became the “places to go” to learn in the business world. But technology’s pace of change and the emergence of digital learning aggregators have brought the effectiveness of the traditional corporate university model into question.

Daniel Gandarilla, vice president and CLO at Texas Health Resources University, said the corporate university is not dead — it’s being redefined. In his research on the subject, Gandarilla found about 10 different viable definitions for the corporate university that are continuing to evolve. This one by Kevin Wheeler and Eileen Clegg from 2005 exemplifies how the definition is evolving: “A true corporate university (CU) has moved beyond training and education and into the daily challenge of getting results. It provides leadership in supporting people and processes to achieve bottom-line success for the organization.”

Some argue that the term “corporate university” shouldn’t even be used anymore. Senior Vice President and CLO at Northwell Health Kathleen Gallo said the term is outdated. “Words matter. Even when I hear it, I think of 30 years ago. It pigeonholes corporate universities as an antiquated model,” she said. “All business organizations need to have a structure in place that provides systematic processes to advance their organization through growing the knowledge, competencies, skills and attitudes of their employees – whatever they call that.”

David Vance, executive director at the Center for Talent Reporting and former president at Caterpillar University, said if he could run Caterpillar University again he wouldn’t use the term “university” in the title. He argues that for many people it connotes the idea of an academic institution. “It’s like you’re trying to bring the academic into the corporate world, and it brings up notions of a large course catalog that employees, like students, just pick from,” Vance said. “That’s the old, traditional training department model. The corporate university was supposed to be about strategic alignment and focused courses.”

Vance said he’s seen a concerning trend of CLOs changing the mission of corporate universities to simply “giving employees what they want.” But he said that attitude is reverting to the reactive model, which is the opposite of where the future needs to go. “They weren’t living back then, so they think it’s a brand-new thing, but really they are going back to where we were 40 years ago,” he said.

If the sole mission of the corporate university is to give employees what they want, Vance argues those universities will become extinct — displaced by aggregators who can give employees what they want at low costs and entirely outside the corporate system. “My objection is against the model that gives up on this corporate university that came out of the late 1980s and just goes to reactively meeting employee’s needs,” he said. “I would recommend we still have the traditional focus on strategic alignment meeting business needs, plus meeting individual learning needs using all the new tools that are available to us.”  (May 3, 2018 https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2018/05/03/future-corporate-un...)