Developing a Learning Culture

For some reason I have been fascinated with programs that pair Industry with local colleges to help train leaders within the organization. I feel that these partnerships are extremely advantageous when your geographic area are single industry dominated. In my case, I have been working on a side project at work to develop an Associates degree program that is specific to my industry and basically have it become a supervisor training program. Because we are not the only show in town the local community college will hopefully see this as an opportunity to bring in many adult learners who are on a stable career path and more academically focused. To create the two year program I looked at other business programs and forestry/wood products programs and combined the highlights of both to create a basic level of competency we, as an organization, would like to see our beginning managers have. The ultimate goal of this is to push our younger talent to go back to school if they do not have a degree and begin to broaden their horizons a bit while practicing computer skills and other core competencies they will need if they choose to advance in the company. The program I created has a couple different parts:

1. Basic curriculuum and program philosophy (self directed learning, networking, sharing of information).

2. Mentorship program within our company to track academic progress and encourage participation.

3. Both a pay boost and tuition assistance while enrolled, pay boost becomes permanent once graduated.

4. A plan to communicate the benefits of this with upper level leaders and encourage buy-in.

5. A solid explanation of why this program is needed.

Honestly, the main reason why we need a program like this is because we are in the middle of a culture change that has not been communicated very well. It used to be that if you kept your head down and did your work you would be taken care of. Nowadays the current leaders are looking for people to push to broaden their scope and skills themselves. The lower level managers are used to having development opportunities spoon fed to them without asking and now there is this new expectation that they need to find it themselves. I don't feel like this message is being communicated apropriately. The feeling like they don't really need to develop themselves outside of what they learn at their job is prevalent. I think that the above program will help to create some inertia for leaders to start to seek out learning opportunities whenever possible.

Best of all, the technical work of curriculuum development is done by the college and all we have to do is pitch what we want out of it and give input on the results. Before you start developing some crazy training program it is good to look around and see if someone else can do it better and at a lesser cost to the company. Not to mention the fact that the program will be open to other organizations and students will be able to share lessons learned from a broader perspective than just one particular organization's.