Training Without a Campus (Tim Bray Quoted in The Wall Street Journal)
Many corporations are looking to provide employees with immediately applicable skills — the sort that can help them navigate the downturn. And that’s something they say private education providers can offer expediently. “When you have trained leaders in bad economic times, it makes a world of difference,” says Tim Bray, vice president and chief learning officer for Quintiles Transnational Corp., a Durham, N.C., pharmaceutical-services company that hired Forum Corp. to provide most of its senior-manager training programs several years ago.
Mr. Bray says he has shied away from sending employees to broader business-school courses because executives now are focused on delving into company problems and the current economic climate. “They see our balance sheet,” he says. “They don’t [need to] go to Wharton and see a balance sheet.”
The need to coach managers abroad has sparked interest in the international reach of training providers. Mr. Bray says training executives, who work out of Quintiles’ 59 countries, without requiring air travel is a priority. After considering various options last spring, the company hired Forum Corp., which has nine global locations, to customize management courses for leaders in emerging markets like Hungary and Indonesia. And Mr. Bray says that expenses are at least 30% lower with a private firm than if the company went with a business school.