Degrees of motivation

JUNE 2010

DURING  the GFC executive education was all about up-skilling and waiting for the recruitment sector to recover before reaping the benefits.

With corporations now looking to retain talent through personal development, motivation and rewarding outcomes, offering tertiary qualifications to the best employees is now drawing parallels with extra salary incentives.

SCU’s Graduate College of Management (GCM) director of corporate programs Ben Faranda, says corporate university programs are becoming more popular with HR managers looking for alternative ways to retain talented staff.

“Southern Cross University and in particular the GCM, have been running corporate programs with a series of very satisfied clients and successes,” says Faranda.

“The concept is fairly simple, yet highly elegant. GCM’s corporate programs design a series of workshops and modules that are used within corporate environments as a form of executive education, personal development and performance improvement.”

Faranda says having an academic edge is becoming increasingly important as the economy grows, industry returns to hiring and the search for top talent ‘heats up’. With the trend in mature-age education not looking like slowing down, Australian companies may even replicate their US counterparts and ‘team up’ with a partner university.

“You will find HR managers and organisational development managers increasingly focusing on ways to retain their current pool, let alone start the arduous and expensive process of recruitment,” says Faranda.

“External research and examples from the USA indicate that more and more firms will team up with a university to deliver their executive level learning programs.

“For example there is a McDonald’s University, a GE university and so forth.

“While they are branded under the corporate name, they are in essence and in most cases a joint venture.

“An Australian example of this is Coles Group, under Wesfarmers, who work closely with Deakin University for their executive education requirements.”