Corporate Universities

Given the importance of an organization’s human capital to business success, aligning training and competency development with business needs is a key challenge. In the last 10 years, many companies created corporate universities to face this challenge. In this paper, corporate universities are presented as training or learning organizations that contribute to business objectives such as “to increase business performance” through a better short- and long-term learning approach. This is connected to many forms and methods of learning: formal learning processes, informal learning, team learning, collaboration, social networking, community building, etc. Learning needs are often driven by simply checking the training catalogue. As this is more the job of a training department, corporate universities really come into place when companies see the education of their employees as a strategic instrument to create competitiveness. As globalization creates pressure on companies, the knowledge and experience of employees become the most important difference among competitors. The resulting competition leads to better innovation, faster processes, higher productivity and fewer costs.