An Interview with Kevin Wheeler
In 2005 I wrote a book called “The Corporate University Workbook” In it, I outlined several charters for a corporate university and suggested a structure and operating model. The world has significantly changed since 2005 and much of what I wrote is no longer relevant. This is an edited version of an interview I recently gave on my current views on the future of corporate education.
What’s the role of the corporate university in today’s environment?
Assume you work in a company and the current pandemic hits. How does it quickly help people adapt to virtual work? How does it help people learn the best practices for working from home? Here is where the corporate university can be very useful. If the corporate university was proactive, future-focused, and sponsored by the CEO, it could immediately start to provide that kind of support. They could say to employees, here are some best practice, here’s how to set up your virtual environment.
That’s one example, but companies are going to be continuously faced with the things happening that they didn’t plan to happen, that they couldn’t anticipate. The most successful way to deal with uncertainty is to adapt quickly. Evolution and survival are all about adaptation and learning. To me, the new charter for a corporate university is teaching people how to adapt quickly, evolve and change. I think that’s really critical if companies are going to be successful.
Another example is in automotive manufacturing Why didn’t the large car manufacturers switch to electric cars? Leaders are focused on today’s problems and rarely have time to look at the future. Suddenly they’re asked by the market to deliver something they’ve never done before. How do they do that? How do they quickly train the workforce to build electric cars? How do they change the culture of the company to do that? A good corporate university could have helped managers see the emerging future and it could have developed strategies to deal with the change. This is where learning is critical. This is where if I can teach you really quickly how to do something I have a big advantage.
Aren’t certificates and degrees Important? Don’t they document my knowledge?
Academic universities are too slow in developing and delivering current knowledge and skills. . For a university to develop a new degree can take 10 years. I haven’t got 10 years, I’ve got only 10 days or weeks, so how can I learn to do something quickly? I don’t care about the formal degree and all the other things that go with it because they’re not critical. What’s critical is surviving. The corporate university can support rapid change, dealing with the unknown, helping organizations experiment with new approaches – a kind of an R and D function for developing people, For example, let’s try this approach with a group of people, and let’s have another group try it a different way, and let’s see which one works better. Experiment and develop good practices for dealing with the future.
Companies like Google, Facebook don’t require new employees to have a college degree. What’s important is can you do the job? The real focus today is on skills and motivation and the ability to learn quickly. I’ll hire you because you’re a smart person, you have a lot of energy, and you’ve done some things in your life that I think are relevant to our company. I will hire you, and you can learn on the job supported by the corporate university.
Certificates and traditional documentation of training are useless. Almost everything you learn today is obsolete tomorrow. The assumption is that what you learned will be valid for a long time into the future. I think the point today is what you learned today you’re going to have to forget tomorrow. Imagine if I gave you a degree in BASIC programming a few years ago. It wouldn’t be very useful today, but I have a certificate. It says I’m an expert at it, but it’s useless. A degree in liberal arts or a degree in math are fine because they’re very broad. They cover a discipline that provides fundamental skills. I’m a big believer in the liberal arts and having people study a broad curriculum, but to give somebody a certificate in a specific process or method or on a specific tool does not have much value. he world changes too quickly, the content changes, the philosophy changes.
What is your model of a modern corporate university?
The corporate universities of the 1980s and nineties are obsolete, that model is not relevant anymore. I think the model today has to be quite different.
The function of a good corporate university is to challenge the status quo, to suggest alternatives, to challenge the assumptions the company makes, and to constantly push the company into new directions or better directions to make sure that it stays at the edge of technology and the edge of development. If a corporate university were staffed with the right level of people it would be pushing the organization into the future. If CUs had done this at GM or BMW 10 years ago and pushed them to embrace electric cars, there would have never been a Tesla because general motors and BMW would already have done it. But they didn’t do it because they were stuck in yesterday.
A relevant corporate university would work with the CEO, work with a leadership team to bring in ideas about the future. One of the reasons I created the Future of Talent Institute was for that purpose, how do we bring the new ideas in even if they’re crazy. How do we get the people in the company to think about them these ideas, to challenge assumptions, and say, how come you’re doing it this way? Who pushes for those sorts of changes? And to me, that’s what a corporate university really should be all about. Challenging pushing, helping to anticipate change, bringing in outside future information into the company about what’s going on in our industry.
It’s not training, it’s not development per se, it’s about creating the future. It’s saying, we’re going to bring in future ideas and concepts and challenge you. At the same time, we will do our best to provide you with learning resources and people so that you can develop and go to the next level. Sometimes that might be a course. Sometimes it might just be talking to some really smart person. It’s a whole variety of things, but the focus is more on the future and not so much on learning development and facilitating learning.
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