Managed learning for engineers/scientists in a corporate university setting

Abstract

Corporate education in engineering firms is valued with varying degree depending on the nature of the economic sector, the climate of the firm, and the perspective of the leadership team. Organizations must cope with new customer demands, shifting employment pools, cyclical economic pressures, and their own internal needs to acquire the technical competencies to capture new business and deliver on contractual promises. Furthermore, the relentless advancement of the engineering practice has caused practitioners to grow increasingly out of synch with their earlier college education, which has created a serious education gap in firms with aging professional workforces. The corporate university offers aerospace and engineering firms an opportunity to align learning resources to strategic objectives by centralizing corporate education. The vision of the corporate university is to fill current need and to plan for future critical skill development in three content areas. These are critical skills development, leadership and management development and professional development. The scope of these content areas is integrative and overlapping. The paper posits why training is necessary to the strategic success of large aerospace firms, discusses the background of corporate universities in the international arena, presents a universally accepted comparison between the traditional view of decentralized training departments and the centralized corporate university perspective, outlines a working learning content model that encompasses a multi-tier approach, suggests critical activities for the startup, development and maintenance of the corporate university, and ends with a high level two-phase approach for creating and launching a corporate university