Convergenc

Business, Corporate Universities and E-Learning

By John Y. Jones* Jeanne Meister, a leading expert in corporate education, defines a corporate university as “the strategic umbrella for developing and educating employees, customers, and suppliers in order to meet an organization’s business strategies.”1 Its purpose is to provide company-related business education for individuals affiliated with the business and to foster a shared company vision. There are several reasons why a growing number of companies are establishing their own corporate university. It can enhance productivity, profits, and global competitiveness as workers apply their education to the marketplace. It can provide added incentives for employees to stay where they are rather than leave for a rival company or even another country. It may also become a profitable division, offering courses to the public for a fee and bringing prestige to the company. In 1927, General Motors was the first company in North America to develop its own educational division, calling it the General Motors Engineering and Management Institute (GMI).2 It was a novel idea that soon caught on with other firms, although the focus for much of the twentieth century was just on grooming future managers. In addition, “classes were not typically aligned with overall business plans but were consistently reactive to observed problems in the workplace.”3 The modern incarnation of the corporate university began in 1961 with McDonald’s “Hamburger University,” a facility designed to prepare McDonald’s executives and franchisees for running the now-famous fast-food restaurants.4 The idea behind Hamburger University was simple: to retain a sense of company unity through instilling corporate values and teaching basic business skills to all employees. In this way, the corporate university played a direct role in helping expand McDonald’s influence worldwide. Hamburger University now has branches in England, Japan, Germany and Australia.5 The...