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Research Brief
Position Description - Community Manager 
The Community Manager is responsible for designing, implementing, nurturing and evaluating an online Community of Practice (CoP), ensuring member engagement, alignment with business needs, and ultimately, impact on the company. This position could be located anywhere within the organization, depending upon the degree to which the company online community and networking system is structured as "grass roots", or open for functions, roles, departments, or members to initiate and lead their own CoPs. In some cases, the Community Manager reports to the Chief Learning Officer or the Learning Technology Director within a learning organization. Read More »
Tool
Position Description - Global Learning Leader (updated 10/2011)
This tool provides some insight into the scope, priorities, and compensation for the role of the Global Learning Leader. The Global Learning Leader may be called any of several dozen titles, such as Chief Learning Officer; Vice President of Global Learning; Senior Director of Global Talent Management; Executive Vice President of Talent and Professional Development; or Manager, Organization Learning and Development. The variability of the title reflects organizational culture and needs. Often, these positions may not exactly describe the same kind of position.
In order to provide some generalized principles, we’ve settled on the term Global Learning Leader to ... Read More »
Research Brief
The Business Case for Creating a Corporate University
This paper sets forth the business case for creating a corporate university, based on the premise that corporate universities are the current best practice for systematically building human capital – a key capability for adaptive, innovative, knowledge-based organizations. The term “corporate university” is most prevalent in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, but whether it is called an academy, institute, or center for excellence, the feature that distinguishes it remains the same: the alignment of key learning programs so they actively support the strategic interests of the business.
Corporate universities offer a curriculum designed to support major change initiatives, serve to align staff development with business goals and improve the ROI associated with training investments. Corporate universities help create the conditions for strategic agility and innovation in a knowledge economy. Successful corporate universities have executive support and oversight to assure corporate goals and training align; appropriate technologies to assure and measure transfer and retention of knowledge and skills; and a well documented organizational plan for execution. Companies with efficient and effective corporate universities show measurable improvements to the bottom line in shareholder return, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Read More »
Research Brief
Executive Summary: The Role of the Community Manager -- A Review of Community of Practice Management Strategies that Maximize Engagement and Impact
Learning and development within organizations has changed as a consequence of the availability of collaboration tools, but many learning organizations have struggled to define the roles and skills needed to maximize the business impact of these tools in order to provide better results, quicker. When provided with the capability to connect more easily with colleagues, the worker's level of activity in his/her own learning is increasing — from that of a passive recipient of learning to an active, self-initiator of learning.
The shift in Learning & Development units to enable learning across the enterprise requires a new and different set ... Read More »
Research In-depth Report
The Role of the Community Manager: A Review of Community of Practice Management Strategies that Maximize Engagement and Impact
Learning and development within organizations has changed as a consequence of the availability of collaboration tools, but many learning organizations have struggled to define the roles and skills needed to maximize the business impact of these tools in order to provide better results, quicker. Due to technological innovation — particularly with respect to availability of collaboration applications on the Internet and Web 2.0 tools — people are now able to collaborate more effectively and efficiently, without regard to geographic barriers. When provided with the capability to connect more easily with colleagues, the worker's level of activity in his/her own ... Read More »
Commentary
Avoid Communication Traps When Planning New Initiatives
When compared across the years of data we have amassed on the subject, CorpU research has noted that learning executives have recently become much more adept at communicating strategy across their team and across their company. Nonetheless, many new learning initiatives flounder because not enough time was spent on internal and external marketing. Though focused on innovation, Georgia Everse's recent Harvard Business Review post, "Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation", lays out eight communication traps that can cause a less than desirable learning initiative roll-out.
Eight Communication Traps
Prof. Everse notes that "innovative ideas, initiatives, products, culture transformations, you ... Read More »
Research Brief
NIIT - Running Learning Like a Business
Across the globe, many learning organizations view themselves as overhead or manage themselves against a set of metrics that are about volume and activity levels. Ed Trolley, author of Running Training like a Business, recognized that businesses were having trouble interacting with training organizations because the language, behaviors and measures of success were drastically different. His proposed solution is simple: run training like any other business.The foundations of his solution are effectiveness and efficiency. An effective training organization will get more than a dollar back for every dollar they spend, adding value to the business. An efficient training organization ... Watch Video »
Research In-depth Report
Portfolio Management: Juggling the Prioritization of Learning Programs
Maximize value of learning investments while minimizing risk
Improve communication and alignment between learning and business leaders
Encourage business leaders to think "team," not "me," and to take responsibility for program selection
Allow your learning organization to schedule resources more efficiently
Reduce the number of redundant offerings and make it easier to eliminate marginal programs
Read More »
Research Brief
Learning Facilities
Corporate learning facilities are as unique as the corporations that own and operate them. As with many aspects of corporate decision-making, facilities’ trends seem to go in cycles; from centralized to decentralized, from leased to owned, from utilitarian to extravagant. At any time one company might be centralizing training while another, even in the same industry and market, will be working towards greater decentralization. Read More »
Research In-depth Report
8th Annual Benchmark Funding Study Chapter
Funding is a critical issue for all learning organizations. There is always a balancing act between the amount of money that could be spent to fulfill the strategic needs of the business and the amount allocated to Learning and Development (L&D). And, in previous business downturns, training of all types was the first function that companies looked to cut when they needed to save money. It was considered an expense rather than an investment. This has changed over the last few years, and L&D groups have not seen budgets cut dramatically, despite the difficult economic climate. In fact ... Read More »
Case Study
Tenaris - Culture
We sat down with Fabio Tonolini, Director of TenarisUniversity, at Training 2008 to talk about the construction of Tenaris’ corporate university. He was kind enough to share with us what we hope will be the first of many member submitted videos on CorpU TV.
At a time when many companies were trying to make their corporate universities “lean and wall-less”, Tenaris built a brick and mortar structure. As a worldwide company, they saw great value in bringing they employees together at the company headquarters in Argentina, helping Tenaris create a unified global culture. Watch Video »
Case Study
Plastipak Packaging Inc - Building a Corporate University
The owner and CEO of Plastipak Packaging had a vision: establish a corporate university that would increase the company's bench strength, specifically by deepening the technical expertise of associates who work with Plastipak's proprietary blow-molding equipment. His charge to the learning team? Develop and launch Plastipak Academy to fulfill this need. Driven by a passion for business alignment, Diane Hinton and her team proposed a corporate university model that would meet not only the CEO's initial priority, but would also touch a variety of other prevailing business needs the company was facing. Upon executive approval, the learning ... Watch Video »
