The corporate universities, then, have a closed character and use ICT as an effective tool to transfer the knowledge and skills required by the organization.
1. Corporate Universities
Corporate universities are relatively new organizations in the education market.
They respond to the need of companies to deliver non-formal education programs to their collaborators, in the context of Continuing Education.
In this way, they provide a comprehensive response to their specific instructional requirements, which are not being satisfied by traditional training institutions.
The corporate universities, then, have a closed character and use ICT as an effective tool to transfer the knowledge and skills required by the organization.
The generation of corporate universities implies the development of policies and strategies that until very recently seemed to be entirely exclusive to the entities of Formal Education.
Corporate universities, therefore, develop and implement comprehensive training plans, which favor the development of people and keep motivational levels high through the establishment of individual improvement paths.
As a consequence of the good organizational climate that occurs, everyone feels satisfied, employees because they grow professionally and the organization benefits from better productivity indicators.
2. Labor skills
One of the most important differentiators between traditional formal education versus corporate universities is that the latter orient their instructional efforts to training for job competencies, which effectively cover their training needs, projecting them even to longer-term processes and of a more permanent nature.
It is known that there are countless definitions of "job competencies". The important thing is that in Chile a model is being implemented that considers 3 fundamental competencies: behavioral, methodological or knowledge, and techniques or skills.
The set of these competences, related to a specific work activity, give rise to the Occupational Profile of said activity.
Then, the corporate universities take charge of this set of competencies and when establishing the respective occupational profiles, they also develop the corresponding modular curricula.
3. Competency-based training.
One of the major problems of corporate universities is the need to design job training modules that ensure the transfer and acquisition of skills in the participants of their programs.
For these purposes there are various methodologies, but undoubtedly one of the most efficient is Activity-Centered Learning (Handlungs Orietierung, by Joahnnes Koch), which has the advantage of not blocking traditional methodologies, but rather opens the possibility of incorporate them, insofar as they are useful for training purposes.
Activity-Centered Learning has 6 or 4 key steps, depending on implementation needs, although the 4-phase version is more efficient for the development of short modular programs.
The 4 phases correspond to the EIAG methodological strategy, an acronym that responds to each of the stages that the participants carry out in the development of their learning processes and which are mentioned below:
- Experimentation: refers to the articulation of information and experience, experienced by all members of a group. Identification: corresponds to the stage of selection of the relevant theoretical and practical aspects acquired from experimentation. Analysis: people analyze the flows or joints that allow the materialization of the results observed in the experimental phase. Generalization: it responds by “keeping” in mind the results obtained from the three previous stages and allowing the practical implementation of the skills acquired from that moment on and into the future.
4. Means and strategies for the transfer of competences.
As mentioned above, corporate universities use all available educational resources, having found a great ally in communications technology.
Thanks to ICT, it is possible to offer within the organization a range of training products, characterized by their flexible hours, easy access, adaptation to the participant's learning pace and other widely known advantages.
The most notable disadvantage is the impersonality of the processes, because even on the assumption that there is an e-learning tutor, people are used to communicating with people live.
As a solution to this deficit, b-learning (Blended) programs have been designed, which mix face-to-face sessions with virtual ones.
The experiences in this modality have been widely satisfactory and the current trend in corporate universities in Europe and the United States is to incorporate more b-learning, over pure e-learning.
5. Assessment of skills
As complex as the design of training programs based on competency training is the definition of an accepted model for evaluating these competencies.
In Chile, the adaptation of the Canadian model called PLAR, Prior Learning Assessment Recognition, has been chosen, whose original objectives are to evaluate a worker's previous competencies for certification purposes.
However, the assessment instruments involved in the process are fully valid for any competency-based instructional process and allow flexible application at various stages of the development of the training modules.
6. Impact evaluation
This evaluation is based on the well-known Kirkpatrick model, which has had some modifications after its creation in the 1960s (Phillips or Hamblin, for example), but which is still substantially in force.
The model includes 4 levels of evaluation:
- Level 1, Reaction, seeks to detect the degree of satisfaction of the module participants and is applied to all of them at the end of the training activity. Level 2, knowledge, measures the acquisition of methodological competences, fundamentally. It can be identified according to the qualifications obtained by the participants or through a knowledge test applied to a sample of the participants. In this case, the instrument is applied a couple of months after the end of the training Level 3, of behaviors and applicability, measures the behaviors acquired and applied by the participants, as well as their new skills in the workplace. It also requires a sample of participants and uses a variety of observation instruments, as well as online surveys of supervisors and co-workers. Level 4 measures the Return on Investment, ROI, of training. It consists of instruments for the economic analysis of training, with key indicators for productive companies being aspects such as a reduction in accident rates, an increase in production, a reduction in rejects in quality controls, less material loss, etc.
And in the case of service organizations, aspects such as the decrease in customer complaints, less late payment, higher sales, fewer stress licenses, among other aspects, can be measured.
