ZHANG Yukun
(School of Continuing Education, Tsinghua University)
Abstract: The article summarizes four types of continuing education cooperation between enterprises and universities. The four types are the expert consulting, the enterprise development program, the professional education, and the enterprise-learning platform. For each type, the article analyzes and discusses a practical case, summing up its successful experience and effects. The discussions give us a clear clue to catch the essential factors in the cooperation and make us easy to learn lessons and experiences in the cooperation.
Keywords: cooperation between enterprises and universities, type, continuing education
1.Current types
The strategy of invigorating and strengthening China through science, education, and talents brings new opportunities to continuing education cooperation between enterprises and universities, and makes the single entrust training mode in the past become the current variety of models that can be summarized as the following four types:
1.1 Expert Consulting
The expert consulting is a kind of advisory services provided by the experts from colleges and universities to needed enterprises. Based on complete research , the experts guide the enterprises analyzing risks and opportunities of the business environment through lectures or by participation into the projects, make them recognize their strengths, weaknesses and realize what the problems or contradiction they face, thus boost the enterprises making strategic decisions scientifically to facilitate the effective growth by means of discussions and dialogues.
1.2 Enterprise Development Program
The enterprise develop program is a “tailored” internal training course customized to the middle or senior managers of the enterprises and is designed based on their features. The program integrates industry characteristics, competitive environment, cultural features, personnel characteristics, and development status together to make a deep analysis on training needs and to offer a variety of training solutions. The training objectives, curriculum, professors, and teaching methods are designed to satisfy the individual needs of the enterprises; the program not only aims at the practical problems, but also improves managers’ abilities to analyze and solve problems. As a result, both individuals and enterprises take advantages and develop jointly from the practice of business management.
1.3 Professional Education
The professional education is a professional training mode dedicated to the enterprises’ key personnel. Making the best possible use of its strong academic and research strengths and its team of experts, colleges and universities help enterprise train their core professional and technical personnel, and guide them on their major projects and key research cases, thus enhance the enterprises’ core competitiveness.
1.4 Enterprise-learning Platform
The enterprise-learning platform is a lifetime learning program opened to all the employees. This platform, or the enterprise self-learning system, is supported by the comprehensive advantages of colleges and universities, integrated with all the best educational resources at home and abroad, based on the employees’ learning and development needs, and made use of modern distance learning technology.
The above 4 types of continuing education cooperation between enterprises and universities cover all the employees from all levels of an enterprise, including the senior managers, professional technicians, etc. In fact, the types vary with staff from all levels and suit the instruction to individual’s grade; therefore, these learning modes fully meet everyone’s need to study further.
2.Practices
In the practice of continuing education, universities and enterprises have cooperated a lot, and the cooperation are basically in the form of the above four types. Let’s us discuss a typical example of each type and summarize its successful experience, meaning, and value.
2.1 Expert Consulting—The Cooperation between China Minmetals Corporation and Tsinghua University
Due to the global economic crisis, China Minmetals Corporation has encountered operational difficulties since the fourth quarter of 2008. In order to extricate itself from this difficult position, the company studied Practice of Scientific Outlook on Development[1] actively, thus put forward a proposal to apply the expert consulting of Tsinghua University; that is, they intended to invite professor Angang Hu, an economist, giving a lecture on Scientific Outlook on Development and guiding the top executives exploring new ideas on future development of the corporation.
After the cooperation was confirmed, the two sides had a timely communication. China Minmetals Corporation provided its industry promotion planning report, its annual operation report, the mobilization speech on studying the Practice of Scientific Outlook on Development, and its practices to professor Angang Hu, and at the same time, the company required that professor Hu should give instructions and helps on its development combined with implementing the Scientific Outlook on Development, and the remedies should be offered at the level of national strategy. The leaders of China Minmetals Corporation pointed out clearly that the consulting cooperation should find out what the cruxes were and propose an effective solution; the “cruxes” were the still spreading global financial crisis, the unfathomable world economic recession, and still severe national economic situation. The “effective solution” was to properly implement the Scientific Outlook on Development; that is, to invite experts to analyze the problems with Scientific Outlook on Development and to propose effective plans to solve the crisis, difficulties, or challenges of the company; thus, the corporation could operate lucratively.
After thoroughly studying and doing research on the materials of the company, professor Hu, in the process of consulting, analyzed and criticized the recent national economic promotion policy, especially the critical points that were closely related to the company's main businesses deeply, thus helped the leaders get a clear understanding of its situation, clarify the direction, and find out the breakthrough point to get rid of the hard position. Professor Hu guided the leaders discussing the solutions to the problems and stressed that they should think in the perspective of system, “You have difficulties, so do your competitors. Therefore, under the hard situation, the winner should be the one who can withstand pressure and find out his way more quickly.” Hence, it was a fruitful expert consulting.
Although the expert consulting always held in the form of lectures, it is not a only lecture but an interaction or dialogue on enterprise development between famous experts and enterprises. First of all, experts are well-informed and knowledgeable, and corporate executives know its own practice very well; as a result, the ideal collision between them should produce important ideas and methods that may save the corporations from the crisis. Secondly, experts can benefit from this consulting service as well since the service brings them opportunities to put theory into practice; experts know enterprises, their business needs, and future research directions better through the consulting service, making them do deeper research on the targeted companies and offering better services later. As a whole, the expert consulting is an efficient mode of continuing education cooperation as it may yield a combined effect that is far beyond the effect of 1+1=2.
2.2 Enterprise Development Program— The Cooperation between Xinxing Pipes Group and Tsinghua University
Xinxing Pipes Group has cooperated with Tsinghua University on its personnel training in a large-scale since 2006. The company hoped that the program could intensify the company’s series of training, accelerate the speed of updating concepts, further emancipate the mind and productive forces, and enhance its competency on innovation quickly.
Tsinghua University offered its series of training with the most preferential resources and policies, set up a project group, hired famous experts as the directors of the group, and assigned associate professors and doctors as the members of the group also. The two sides communicated many times on the needs analysis, project design, implementation process, and service details to pledge to fulfill the program effectively.
In the process of needs analysis, the project group conducted a needs survey in the form of questionnaires, personal interviews, and group discussions. First, based on the interview outline and the questionnaire survey, the group exchanged ideas with the related personnel making sure that the findings accorded with the actual situation of the company. Second, it conducted both qualitative and quantitative analyses to analyze, organize the findings, and to make a research report. This type of survey guarantees a large-scale research to be scientific and practical, and thus helps the experts carry out an accurate and scientific analysis or judgment on the training needs.
In accordance with the needs analysis, the two parties communicated frequently and determined the training scheme to be systematic, pertinent, and practical. The university made carefully check to ensure its quality of instructors through a trial listening, informed each hired one with the situation of the project in details, and put forward specific teaching requirements; as a result, the school knew its teaching quality fairly well.
In order to ensure the successful implementation of the project, the project group carefully prepared and worked in details in many aspects, such as the training field, facilities, teaching materials, logistics services, and student organizations, etc. Moreover, the training effect was more prominent by establishing a steering group of experts, the project research, and a student forum.
Practice proves that the enterprise development program is a win-win continuing education mode benefiting for both enterprises and universities. First of all, the program, which is a training course tailored specifically to management personnel based on the analysis of training needs, is so pertinent that could increase the overall quality of corporate management. Secondly, the curriculum is designed in accordance with the actual situation of the company; therefore, it is full of practicality that could help the corporation solve its actual operational problems and promote its development. Finally, colleges and universities are benefited from this program also as the program enhances and impacts their development profoundly; it is like a bridge helping universities know talent demand of large corporations better, and thus constantly improving the service quality of continuing education.
2.3 Professional Education—Tsinghua University and Master of Engineering Station for Enterprises
To meet the enterprises’ demand for practical high-level talents, the Ministry of Education established master of engineering education in 1997. Tsinghua University took the lead in establishing a station to train master of engineering jointly with some large and prosperous corporations. In fact, the establishment was a new undertaking as it symbolized higher education providing professional services initially for the national economy and enterprise development. This type of training method has launched as a pilot project since 1998. Among all the training stations, one-third of them were built for high-tech enterprises, and one-third were for national defense research or production sectors.
In the process of the cooperation, Tsinghua University set different major courses and research directions for distinct enterprises, and interacted with the corporations to formulate their training programs. That is, the syllabus designing and training methods, the thesis topics, as well as the mentor arrangements were designed to meet the specific business training objectives and their actual needs. In order to improve the students’ professional qualities in all domains, besides the major required courses, students were required, according to their different research directions, to take dissimilar elective courses, to read related specialized works, to attend academic lectures, seminars, or professional meetings as well. The students’ thesis topics were, in fact, the technical problems that arose from enterprises’ engineering practices and needed to be solved urgently; that is, the topics were closely related to enterprises’ power of decision on innovation and their research projects. In order to make the training stations perfect, it applied a “double-instructor” system; the mentors not only knew clearly about their students’ throughts, job situations, but also made on-the-spot investigations and followed the track of interviews during their holidays. At the same time, the training stations gave full play to business mentors to guide the students solving the actual problems in practice, and invited them to universities giving lectures and reports to the masters of engineering thereby increasing the richness and practicability of the training.
The training stations built jointly with enterprises break the traditional mode of education. It provides an excellent platform or realistic and effective method that speeds up the training of needed talents in the premise of not affecting normal operations of the corporations. The cooperation brings enterprises into full play thus makes universities become much more practical, applicable, and pertinent in their services, and fosters a lot of professional talents that are competent and faithful. The talents trained under this mode play a very significant role on technology innovation and solving practical problems. Most of them have become the backbone of the enterprise.
2.4 Enterprise-learning Platform—Distance learning Platform for Enterprises offered by Tsinghua University
Business competition is , in essence, a talent competition; therefore, to improve the overall quality and capacity of enterprises is a critical strategy to keep corporations evergreen, and the enterprise-learning platform is a strong support ensuring the lifelong study for all staff. As Tsinghua University regards serving the community as its duty, under the support of relevant ministries and industry associations, it integrates all the best educational resources at home and abroad to build this lifetime learning platform jointly with the enterprises.
In order to broaden horizons, build a good foundation, improve abilities, and train skills, the learning platform brings together a lot of curriculum resources that are pertinent, professional, and cutting-edge, such as frontier lectures of world-famous masters, prestigious MBA classes, outstanding managers forum, professional managers skills, staff professional training, etc. It provides training courses and related services to enterprises more than 300 days per year, and 10 hours a day through its three-in-one remote technology, a network combining satellite digital network, computer network, and cable television broadcasting network together.
The enterprises can choose one of the three ways to train their employees through the platform, the simultaneous study, self-learning, and the customized study, based on their own needs. That is, in accordance with the class schedule, corportation can either study Tsinghua distance learning courses simultaneously through receiving the signals or request to learn any live course of the previous day through its network, and the enterprise can customize its training materials and curriculum from a resources pool that contains nearly 10,000 class hours of quality courses also. Moreover, by bringing the remote platform inside corporations, the enterprises can conduct on-line learning and management.
The enterprise learning platform creates a learning mechanism that is composed of government guidance, resources integration by universities, and enterprises’ power of decision. Universities facilitate enterprises building their learning organizations, their prolonged self-learning systems, and their own “universities” by means of integrating the best educational resources at home and abroad; therefore, schools fully meet the enterprises’ learning needs with low cost and high profit. This learning platform also provides some personalized services to enterprises, such as information exchange, product display, image promotion, and experience sharing. Hence, corporations have more options and more power to make decisions.
3.Summerise
The successful practice of continuing education cooperation between universities and enterprises under the above four types is the outcome of keeping pace with the times, working in coordination, and making joint efforts. Comparing with the single entrust training mode in the past, these cooperation types, which are more pertinent, more practical, more flexible, more innovative, and more consistent with the rules of scientific development, are the inevitable outcomes of social progress. In the practice of the cooperation, enterprises developed talents, solved practical problems, and universities strengthened its awareness of service, found the correct research directions, and enriched the contents of training. Therefore, universities could improve themselves constantly in the process of providing services to enterprises; at the same time, both parties played their exact roles and formed a strategic cooperation partnership. The universities and enterprises joined a strong to strong union to complement strengths and opened a new future hand in hand.
References
[1] Dai GQ, The concluding remarks made at the continuing education symposium held for professional technicians, or the theory seminar, and the fourth session of the fourth council of Chinese continuing engineering education association, (R), 2009, January 16.
[2] Qin ZB, Enterprises’ power of innovation and education for masters of engineering, (R), the speech made at the seminar of the sixth national graduate education for master of engineering, 2008, September 23.
[3] Yu Z, the Cradle for masters of engineering built jointly by Tsinghua University and enterprises, (N), Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, 2000, November 16.
[4] Committee of Chinese universities and large enterprises, The collection of typical cases on the cooperation between Chinese universities and large enterprises, (C), Tsinghua Press, 2006, June.
（The paper was published in the 12th IACEE World Conference on Continuing Engereering Education in October, 2010）
[1] Scientific Outlook on Development was proposed in a speech given by Mr. Hu Jintao, the CPC Central Committee General Secretary, in July 28, 2003. In the speech, he addressed, “ To stick to putting people first, to establish comprehensive, coordinative, sustainable development, and to promote the overall development of socio-economic and human beings,” and the Scientific Outlook on Development is a kind of methodologies fostering reform and development of various undertakings and is derived in accordance with the requirements of, “ making an overall plan on urban and rural development, regional development, economic and social development, harmonious development between man and nature, and domestic development and opening up.” It is an important strategic thinking, and a guiding ideology of Communist Party of China, and was written into the Party Constitution at the 17th natioanl congress of CPC.
