By the end of this year, I have elected to create a corporate university. We will offer online courses and classroom courses. Incentives will be offered to associates who complete various levels of curriculm. Although we deal with many compliance trainings since we are a bank, the array of courses will also deal with personal development and technical development. I am looking for input from anyone who has experience in setting up this type of training plan. Thanks in advance!

I have been with my current financial institution for about 4 years now and we created a corporate University. I was given one main goal, and that was not to take employees out of the branches or their department for unnecessary training. So we started slow, focusing on technical training aspects (teller training, new accounts training). We slowly added advanced courses and management training. My suggestion for compliance training is to find a vendor that offers online training - but be careful! Don't spend too much for it. We were using a vendor that was outrageously priced, and only offered us 16 training courses that we had to load onto our own mainframe. I found another vendor that offers over 100 courses (not all compliance- some generall banking and personal development) for a fraction of the price (check out http://www.digitu.com) they are wonderful and inexpensive. We of course cover any job specific compliance topics in the individual courses, but the examiners have been perfectly happy with the DU content. What other specific information are you looking for? I would be glad to share expereinces where I can!

I created a "univ" for a telco. We had a LMS and hundreds of SkillsSoft courseware. We found most people didn't take the generic 100's of e-courses. My take on a corporate univ. concept is it's just another name for the Training Dept with a LMS.

Consider your own needs analysis before jumping into the breech. Start with the best, books published by Jeanne Meinster and/or Mark Allen. Attend Corporate University Week in Orlando in November. Then, create a plan that will work in your culture and budget.

Make sure to engage your CLO, COO, CFO - their support will be necessary during a "change" in strategy.