Corporate Universities are not training Centres
Abstract of the book of Annick Renaud-Coulon
Corporate Universities: a lever of Corporate Responsibility,
GlobalCCU Publisher - 2008
We must remove the ambiguity. Corporate universities are not
training centres. The fact that corporate universities coexist
with training centres in companies proves this point. And there
are large groups that are organised in this way, because they
have understood the difference between the two bodies. This distinction
becomes evident when one examines the characteristics of a training
centre.
The organisational affiliation of a training centre has
no major political and strategic dimension
Dependent on the HR department, a training centre is never a
place of power, nor one of opposition. There are no major risks
for the company because, at best, one works on case studies,
but never on the real challenges facing the company, choosing
instead to focus on routine issues. The objectives remain focused
on the students and not on their professional situations, something
that the parties involved have no chance of changing, except
through advancing little by little. The ‘trainees’ or ‘students’ are
responsible for putting this teaching into practice, appropriating
the laws from the exercises and usually without help, with the
exception of coaching, which has—and not without reason—witnessed
enormous growth.
Being familiar with the world of training for many years, I
know how many unhappy training managers roll their boulder like
Sisyphus, with consistency, dedication, and the hope that top
management will finally listen to them. But they suffer from
a lack of consistency between rhetoric and practice. This is
a professional vocation with multiple learning areas, but it
is also has a social aspect. Everyone knows that time spent in
training is useful to institutions who want to keep their staff
busy during slow production phases or a career crunch. In short,
even if it does no apparent good, it certainly can't do any harm!
Its functional role distances it from operational realities
Training departments are organised like an organ pipe in the
vertical tube of the HR department. They have a separate function
from other departments, with their own funding, procedures, purchasing
practices, operations and so on. The product offering, whether
available by printed catalogue or computer, consists of seminars,
cycles, conferences for future years, and better management by
hiring trainers and other subcontractors, keeping attendance
records, filling out evaluation questionnaires, and giving orders
for payment. It's a small, ordinary bureaucracy, paced in annual
cycles which are out of sync with the company's unpredictable
and constantly changing economic, technological, and human environments.
It is clear that training centres and even their finest leaders
are obliged to act in a way that is removed from operational
realities, even when they manage to identify actors' needs; which
certainly isn't the case everywhere. Their position in the organisation
gives them little room to manoeuvre and confines them to a supporting
role. While this has its advantages, it certainly does not give
education the strategic importance it deserves. That is particularly
problematic when we think of the amount of money swallowed up
by this function.
Its approach focuses on individuals rather than teams
This is a logical consequence of training centres’ lack
of power. Their target is people, which is commendable though
apart from relying on charismatic training directors, they have
little opportunity to act collectively on genuinely transformational
projects. It is not that they are incapable; rather their operating
leverage does not contain the necessary elements, such as the
production process, management tools, or customer–supplier
relationships, and consequently lacks the legitimacy to act.
At best, training centres can help people advance on their own
paths, provide the means to learn new skills and maintain their
employability. So they do have their uses.
Globalization as an exception
Training centres are connected to an otherwise closed world—the
corporate one—and rare are those proposing activities outside
their own walls, such as bringing in speakers from other countries
and studying foreign cases. This feature is entirely consistent
with the nature of training services, focusing as they do on
the individual and not on teams. They offer seminars with ready-to-use
themes in management, leadership, computer skills, office administration,
management control, multiculturalism and so on. And if they study
the characteristics and impacts of globalisation it is in theory,
not in practice. On occasion they offer international MBAs to
a few select directors, yet the costs are so high that the number
of such students is low.
These words are by no means a plea for the closure of company
training centres; on the contrary. It is important that they
continue developing to perfect individual learning, to prepare
for changes of management by providing the knowledge, competencies
and know-how necessary for career management, and that they exercise
this responsibility with care. But a corporate university possesses
other features that give it a much wider potential. It is a space
for applied education and applied strategies, where priority
is given to teams so that they can understand their company's
dimensions—whether current or future, near or far, familiar
or unfamiliar—and take new paths that depart from the beaten
track and become true political instruments. |