Corporate University for Employees AND Customers?

[Kerry Kaczorowski]

I'd be interested in any perspective or experiences related to starting a corporate university with two separate audiences in mind - internal employees and external customers and partners. I've been tasked with this and of the research I have done, it seems it is not typical to combine the two audiences into one platform. Does anyone know of an organization who has accomplished this successfully (or unsuccessfully for that matter)? Any insight as to why this may or may not be a good idea? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[Jay Krupp]

At the company I work for Newmarket International, we have been quite successful with this approach. We can leverage some of the same content for either audience, it is all a matter of how we use those learning objects in the Moodle LMS we have customized. You are welcome to contact me directly if you want to discuss in more detail. We do everthing from the new customer to advanced certifications, as well as the new internal employee. Take a look at some of the skins we put on the LMS for the various audiences.

Delphi in the Classroom
Thinknewmarketinc
HoteLearning
Newmarket Inc eLearning

[jamie corn]

I have seen many companies use this method to reposition content and to more effectively train their customers on services, products, appplications. One system should be able to manage both audiences using the same administrative interface and reporting tools. Most important to your customers is the ability to be able to access the administrative features of your system with limited permissions to run reports and manage their user population

[Kerry Kaczorowski]

Hi Jay:

This is great, thanks so much for sharing both your comments and examples. I was hoping to get validation on our approach, and your company certainly seems to have a solid program in place - and using Moodle! This gives me a lot of confidence that we can put a successful program together as well. I appreciate the offer to discuss it further, and would very much like to take you up on it. Can you email me your contact information so I can set something up? My email is [e-mail].

Thanks!

[Gregory Reed]

At UL (www.ul.com) we have a corporate university www.uluniversity.com that has 3 colleges that are focused to the internal audiences and an external facing customer college. This has worked very well for UL and is one of growth areas within the corpoartion.

The learning material that is created to support and develop our staff to aid their career development particularly in the Technical college has great commercial and intelectual value to the organisation. We are able to make minor changes to meet the needs of the audience that are looking to gain UL certification on products.

[Melanie Arsenault]

Kerry - I'm glad the group has provided some good guidance for you, and think you're on the right track, especially when it comes to finding a supportive platform for all *first*. From our own experience, we set out to solve one group's needs with an LMS, only to find out as we got deeper and interest grew for possible centralized platform (to serve our internal employees, external partners, and external customers), that the app couldn't yet support the needs of our other audiences without exposing all courses and all rights to them.
Good luck with your new opportunity.

[Jim Walters, EdD,CEM]

Schwan's Food Company in Marshall, MN a very highly ranked corportate university - I think it was ranked #1 in the US or world a year or so ago.

jim

[Randy Speck]

Kerry,

I lead a K-12 private school and have great success with starting a "university" for my employees. I believe it has been an essential part of our school growth over the past several years. The next step for the "university", is to add our customers, which would be our school parents. I have no doubt this will add value to what it is we are looking to accomplish, which is having a unified and growing school culture.

[Amy Dreher]

The Nielsen Company has been operating distinct programs using a single learning management system for both clients and employees for more than five years. If you'd like to discuss this approach in greater detail, your are welcome to contact me directly.

[Michael Teer]

My company has helped a number of customers deploy learning management systems designed to provide learning opportunities to employees, customers and suppliers. The system I support is designed for internal learners (integrated to the HRMS so there is no dual entry of profile data, and learning outcomes can feed other talent management processes) as well as external learners (customers, suppliers). The why and how an external learner gets registered in the system is a detail meant for the implementation process, but a good LMS will allow you to create separate environments, or domains, for internal and external learners - if necessary. You may find that a lot of your content is suitable for both audiences - and if it isn't, the system should allow you to create and maintain groups of learners for catalog security, so offerings are only seen by those learners for whom it is appropriate. For example, a self-paced offering on the performance management system at your company isn't appropriate for external learners, but a web-based offering on a new product or service might be. If access to the University is through the company's portal page, single sign-on and authentication should take care of access and application security (which menu items or options the learner sees) - or you could simply put specific links on the portal so learners never have direct access to the LMS. In short, I think it's a great idea and I wish you well.

[ROBIN RAPINO]

Hi Kerry: I've done this for many clients: NFIB - National Federation of Independent Business, Employers Group of California and Versacold Global Storage to name a few. We are a comprehensive e-learning company offering a full range of services including LMS, catalogue of courses and content development. We can set up various learning markets on our platform; internal employees or external clients. We tailor catalogues to suit the different clientele; and each group (each learner) is given different access levels. It works very well and is easy to track.

email me if you have further questions. [e-mail]

We've been doing this successfully for over 12 years. Hope this helps.

[Jim Beeler]

Our customer is, for most contracts, military commands. It is more important for us to be schooled on their requirements since most of their needs is dictated by doctrine and regulations. I have, however advised upper management on how to school our subcontractors so we are aware of the delta in cultures.

[Joni Brown-Irons]

Yes, my organization has just started this process. Our LMS does a nice job in segmenting the system to allow internal use with one look and external look, by customer with another look. Our approach has been to use the external part as a way to engage and sell to customers very specific blended learning solutions with our project management training. We have typically be using this with customers that either do not have their own LMS,or find their LMS too cumbersome to deal with. We have found this to be fairly successful so far and gives us the ability to provide additional services to our customers around reporting, tracking, etc...on top of the benefit of deploying the content in a nice packaged offering.