On The Operation System Of American Corporate University

The education idea of life-long learning has been widely accepted because of the people's urgent need of self-worth promotion and the pressure of market competition. How company staff, a group separating itself from school education, can learn systematically and efficiently, is regarded as one of the most difficult problems for enterprises and their staff. A new thing called corporate university has emerged in some of the US financial and manufacture enterprises since the 20th century. The corporate university gradually matures in US and has been contributing greatly to the development of the super economic giant.With the intense competition in intellectual and knowledge market, building a corporate into a learning organization is a significant measure for enterprises to improve their market position, and corporate university could be a trial field for such a measure. Meanwhile, corporate university is an organized learning system, with characteristics of openness and innovation. It enables staff to share, transfer and innovate the entrepreneurial intellectual resources, so corporate university is an effective carrier of intellectual management and then their competitive capacity could be promoted essentially. Based on the above, this thesis puts forward three typical patterns of corporate university, namely the transformational corporate university, the synthesized corporate university, and the derivational corporate university. The thesis makes an analysis from the theoretical layer of corporate university's three major components--strategy orientation as the guidance, education system as the core, and the management system as the support. Then, the thesis then makes further analysis of three major components by employing case study. This thesis selects the University of Phoenix, the University of Motorola and the HP Business School respectively representing three typical patterns of corporate university.This thesis holds that Chinese corporate universities can learn from its US counterpart's successful operating system in the following three aspects: Firstly in the aspect of strategic orientation, the development aims should be closely linked to the strategic needs of the mother corporate. Secondly in the aspect of educational system, Chinese corporate universities should project core courses, construct a post-ability-curriculum educational system, improve the current staff system and establish an performance-based evaluation system. Thirdly in the aspect of management system, Chinese corporate universities should establish more investment, adopt college-style structure, building up a learning organization, exert intellectual management function and encourage the participation of all the interest groups involved the university. Undoubtedly, when in learning the management of the US corporate universities'operating system, Chinese enterprises should take into consideration such factors as cultural differences, the localization of the American experience, public welfare, profit gaining and so on.