Training and education collide: A talent development tsunami

The story is old and well-documented. Companies are started. They experience a growth phase, sometimes a meteoric growth phase, and then a few of them achieve market dominance. Growth and the need to guard old business strategies and established product lines begin to take their toll as companies resist change in efforts to keep business going as usual—after all, it has always worked before. Companies that lack the agility and the wherewithal to stay relevant through market shifts begin the slow fade back into obscurity. That is the normal life-cycle of a business—growth, maturity, then decline. However, there is an alarming difference now. The cycle has become compressed. Maturity comes much quicker, and businesses find themselves wondering what happened to their once promising pursuits. This phenomenon is the topic of many board room discussions. And talent is a central theme in many of those board discussions.

Over the past several years, one theme has overwhelmed all others when it comes to talent development in our businesses—adaptable leaders. Adaptability seems to be today’s watchword and rightly so. Competition is fiercer than ever, change is an everyday challenge and finicky consumers are forcing us to be in constant discovery mode to ensure our business remains relevant.

Our businesses must be adaptable and so must our people. Organizations are asking their people to know more, to do more and to experience more. We are transitioning from elevating the specialists, to elevating those with the most broad-based, transportable and adaptable skills.

John Chamber, CEO of Cisco, was quoted in a June, 2010 online Newsweek article titled, “Know What You Don’t Know.” He said, “We’re going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaboration teamwork. I think that’s the future of leadership.” Talent development has to evolve in order to keep up with today’s business environment.

The future calls for employees and leaders who are flexible and adaptable and can be broadly deployed across the organization. Training and education must have broad application and be structured better in order to accommodate leaders who are literally on the move and leading across the business.

Walmart recently announced how it is taking this ideas seriously. This past year, Walmart redesigned its training programs and, in an interesting move, partnered with American Public University (APU), an institution that offers online advanced degrees, to increase the speed of education and make it more available and affordable to associates.  This move looks to be a game-changer.

Eduardo Castro-Wright, Vice Chairman of Walmart, said in the Wall Street Journal’s online edition, "Through this program, you could be eligible to earn college credit for your formal training and job experience. This means if you enroll in a degree program at APU, you could be on a faster track to earning your degree, reducing the length of time you would need to be in school and making the overall cost more affordable." This move helps Walmart training gain accreditation in order to further the education of its associates and let them work faster toward a degree. Other companies are sure to follow.

The training world and academia have always been careful to limit their association. Academia has often considered training programs to fall well short of academic standards, and training has viewed academia as too light on real world application. The evolution of online degree programs has opened the door to allow training programs to gain accreditation, and Walmart has taken advantage. My company, SVI, recently had the opportunity to see this evolution first hand.

Walmart called upon SVI to develop a comprehensive Lifelong Learning Support System (LLSS), to support the rollout and the ongoing administration of the program. The LLSS is a centralized system for fulfilling an associate’s transcript requests by gathering his training, performance and job position history from data scattered throughout Walmart’s systems. The system generates a Walmart Career Portfolio from this information, optimizes the information for APU accreditation and transfers the information to APU’s systems. All this is done electronically, accurately and reliably in a matter of minutes, which is important because of the volume of requests Walmart receives.

System integration between companies and academic institutions is the next big move. Think about what this means to education. In Walmart’s new system, higher education degrees can be pursued through multiple academic institutions as well as training classes from Walmart. Its system can report evaluated training and performance to academic institutions for accreditation through ACE or specific accreditation that the institution has completed.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the lines might be blurring a little between the role of training and the role of higher education. However, they will never overlap completely. Training will always be necessary for specific organizational and functional needs, and academia will always be necessary to grow the arts and sciences knowledge of students according to academic standards and benchmarks. But some overlap is necessary for today’s complex global business environment. Collaboration between trainers and academicians helps elevate the capacity and capability of our current and future workforce.

For the adaptable, transportable leader, this is good news. She may start her college degree pursuits at one school, begin her career, get transferred overseas and attend a new academic institution to complete her degree. Her employers integrated lifelong learning and talent development system would track her growth journey all the way and help her fast track, rather than limit her options. Such collaboration between training organizations and academia gives her an abundance of options.

Collaboration between industries has worked significantly well in the past to drive progress. Consider how the U.S. military now collaborates behind defense. Consider how the telecom world has partnered with computer providers to drive mobile device usage. Consider how healthcare clinics collaborate with hospital systems and even retailers to give patients better and more affordable access. This move toward collaboration between training and academia will help drive significant progress in talent development behind a transportable workforce needed for businesses in order to thrive despite shortening business life-cycles.