ZHONG Min, DANG ShaoYong
Abstract:At present, continuing education has played a key role in education from its previous post as a complementary. It has become an important component in the process of building the Learning Society. In this context, Executive Development Training market has experienced a high-speed growth in recent years. Based on training practice of School of Continuing Education Tsinghua University, this article analyses the Innovative Operation Model of EDT in four aspects including core strategy, resource, learners and value network..
Today, human resources getting to be the core competence of organizations, the life long learning has been the top priority of existence and development of the contemporary society. Continuing learning has grown to the main stage from its previous position as an inferior part of education and become one of the major components in the process of constructing learning society. Under this context, the market of executive development training is experiencing a rapidly growth. As practitioner of the EDT, we realize the key of continuously raising the standard of EDT relying on innovation. EDT gains non-stop energy only from innovation. Exploring on this, we developed an operation model named Innovative Education and Serving the Society as illustrated in Figure 1. The model distinguishes itself by uniqueness and differentiation. In this model, the elements have been mutually and consistently integrated. A strategy of best utilizing predominance of the educational resources helps EDT provide high quality service to the government and enterprises. This article tries to explore and illustrate the model from core strategy, resources, learners and value network based on our practices.
Figure.1: The operation model
Core Strategy: Research and development independently, Differentiation and Focus
Here is a story to show importance of strategy. Two managers, competed each other in certain industry, camped discussing the potential to merge their companies. They encountered a bear wowing as they walking into the woods. One of the managers got a pair of sport-shoes from his pack as the other said to him” Hi you can never expect run override the bear”. This guy answered “It is very likely that I can’t run override the bear, but surely you.” This story tells vividly how critical a strategy is. Forecasting help build and maintain competitive advantage.
Strategy of organizational development is a systematic portfolio. There must be one in all of the strategies performing predominant function and pre-determining the others. It is the effectiveness of core strategy influencing and determining the others.
Via the investigation and study on EDT and practice for the management layer of government and enterprises, we developed our core strategy which features as Research and Development independently, Differentiation and Focus. All of the elements within rely on innovation.
Far more than a vocabulary, innovation means many things. In contrast to EDT courses available in the market, we have fully cultivated the academic advantages of Tsinghua University. Co-responding to the trend and demand of social development, and requirement of the participants of leadership training, we have developed our own leadership training programs and relevant courses for senior level of government officials. Differentiation has been paid great attention and facilitated to build up our uniqueness in the market, which include the methodology, branding and customer service. The Focus strategy assures that we focuses specific market segment, i.e., the middle level and senior managers or administrators from the communist parties, government bodies, enterprises and NGOs. We see the middle level is successor of senior ones.
Our core strategy of Research and development independently, differentiation and focus empowered that we override the competitors in a marketplace whilst maintaining higher effectiveness and efficiency.
Cultivation of Resources: Platform of Advantageous Resources of Academic, Open and Integrated
At present, universities including those for party and government officials offer EDT or MPA training. These programs can be featured as that what the schools for party and government officials pay greater attention on political and governmental policies. We are focusing to develop methodologies and courses with typical features of university taking the advantages of Tsinghua University in education and training resources.
Universities should fully exploit their own advantages and characteristics as offering EDT courses to develop and formulate innovated ways and methodologies. Tsinghua University has conventionally run trainings of administrative human resources for the state and had batches of excellent leaders trained. This owes to advantages of it both at knowledge in terms of professionalism and a cutting edge and the capability in terms of international cooperation and communication. Fully cultivating these resources facilitate the universities’ function to serve the society and a great advantage to develop EDT programs and courseware based on the resource.
Based on the above mentioned advantages and via continuous innovation and improvement, we have developed a serious of high end programs that cover three fields: programs of public and economic management, leadership programs, and education and technology programs. They are featured by different focus while own core contents in common as illustrated in Figure 2. These programs own common characteristics such as focused, specialized and academic.
Figure 2
In according to the spirit of non-stopped self-enhancement and being open to people, society and universe and by integrating advantageous educational resources and exploring the methodology and contents of newly emerged Training by Study, a new course architect has been designed and built up as predominantly at public management and leadership and also combined economic management and enhancement on the essences of leaders. The courses are practical effectiveness orientated and fairly differentiated.
The benefits for participants: Constructing the life-long learning system for the government officials and entrepreneurs, help shape a future leaders
The courses are designed as always participants orientated pursuing the principle that education serves the society, bounded the live subjects for change, practice and innovation. In the implementation process, capabilities of service and course design are keeping enhanced. The focuses are laid on improving satisfaction of learners and benefiting them by what taught. In addition to the trainings face to face, multiple courseware have been developed such as FAQ based on what the learners most likely asking and being interested in, thereafter, the training effectiveness has been improved.
The idea of life-long learning is a vision we insist of in all of our activities. Leadership and management are a kind of critical and dominant social activity in the society of human being and these activities are changing constantly. Therefore, in terms of measuring the success and effectiveness of leaders, the capability of innovation should be centered and observed in addition to their flexibility to the changes in their social context and existence. Whilst the capability of innovation always come from continuing learning and changed perceptions inspired by learning from their experiences. Therefore, we always emphasize to the leaders that there will be no innovated ideas with non learning and thereafter no innovated policies and adequate decision making.
In our training practice, we make great efforts to assure the training objective achieved: (1) The training programs are always designed to benefit learners; (2) The learners can practice the idea of continuing learning back their working environment; (3) The learners can be the model for their colleagues and coworkers and organizations, no matter government or enterprises, to make efforts to build up learning government, enterprises and society. Bearing this in mind, we make the Continuing Learning Club a vehicle providing post-training information and relevant services to the learners for free, to promote the spirit and culture of Tsinghua University in terms of rigorous and diligent study and practice, constructing a life-long learning system for government officials and managers of enterprises and help producing more future’s leaders.
Enhancing the value network: Build up our own trainers pool in an integrated way, Promote and strengthen our brand name and value added services
The competitive advantages of an organization come from not only inside but outside, such as the region it located, surroundings, affiliated resources and other relevant organizations. The organization should be fairly capable to cultivate these resources for its own purpose. The organization itself, with other organizations, its own resources and other resources should be consider and integrated as a value network and to help brand itself. So do the EDT.
In the value network, the first priority should be developing the trainer or facilitator pool. To reserve our competitive advantage, we have endeavored a lot to manage the trainer resources. Relying on the professors of Tsinghua University as the core, we have built up our own trainer’s pool of wide variety and excellence. Amongst them, there are professors from the colleges of Tsinghua University and scholars as well as part time professors or trainer from other universities and those experts in certain fields such as government policy from social training firms and government departments. The trainers from different background bring up different ideas and visions facilitating the learners being more open minded, thoughtful in depth, more sensible for their social responsibility and growing themselves noticeably. In addition, the learners liaison network also help promote the leadership and managerial skills of the learners along with higher level communication among them, which make a platform possible for promoting leadership not only on the training classes but outside. These ways promote and assure satisfied effectiveness for their learning.
On the other hand, taking advantage of the international communication and cooperation, we are exploring effective way for international cooperation. This is to increase the cooperation with foreign universities, internationalize the EDT, and build up a global angle and strategic vision of the learners and the capability for international communication and operation.
To summarize, we have studied in depth the current situation of EDT with clear strategic positioning and been tackling emerged problems instantly. Fully cultivating our advantages in resources, innovative courses and programs and the methodologies of training, we have developed more value added services together with the essential training service for the leaders aiming to promote our brand and help enlarge the team of new type leaders. Along with promoting and strengthening the managerial level of leaders from the government and enterprises, it also promotes the culture of life long learning in the society and helps the development and progress in the society ofChina.
References
[1] Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution，Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
[2] John Kotte, Leading Change, Beijing: The Machinery Industry, 2005.
[3] Clayton M.Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, the Innovator's Solution，Boston, MA. Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
[4] Zhong Min, He Ping, “Organizational Change and Team Learning”, Guangzhou: New Economy, No 284, October 2006.
[5] Zhong Min, Dang Shao Yong, “An Exploration on the Training by Study of the Leadership Laboratory”, Beijing: Continuing Education, No.11,2006.
（The paper was published in the 11th world continuing conference on engereering education on May, 2008）
