Through ‘corporate schools’, a concept of corporate training is emerging that turns the learning process into a moment of continuous knowledge- and skill-sharing, also relying on digital platforms — as done by the Italian multinational specializing in the production of sensors and systems for automation
Academy, corporate university, company school — similar but with different characteristics — are engines of knowledge that organizations offer their people, and sometimes outsiders as well. They represent a ‘place’ to grow professionally, develop individual potential, and increase one’s value in the job market.
Why Corporate Academies matter
- They foster people’s self-empowerment, making them co-responsible for how, when and in which direction to strengthen their own knowledge
- They strengthen people’s employability, making them attractive on the internal or external job market, in view of future career development
- They scale learning according to a “learning formula”:
- 70% on the job, based on day-to-day experience;
- 20% through dialogue, interaction and mentoring alongside colleagues and managers;
- 10% through formal training moments or courses.
A ‘corporate school’ gathers experiences that are direct/internal to the company and indirect/external to the organization; it offers in-person and digital courses (sometimes run by major universities); it grants access to a constantly updated library (videos, articles, books, TED talks). It is not a system for filling skills gaps, nothing tactical: the Academy is in fact a strategic choice.
As Giuseppe Capiello, Associate Professor at the University of Bologna’s Department of Management, also argues, the Academy drives the innovation of knowledge, of the exchange process, and of the transfer and creation of intellectual capital. It is aimed both at the individual and at the whole organization, in training and in the execution of strategy.
Corporate Academy, Ford in the early 1900s, the Cloud today
As Capiello wrote in an article for HBR Italia, “it was 1927 when General Motors founded its own Academy, to train staff to carry out increasingly specialized tasks. Today, technological innovations have increased the need to create, internally, or acquire from outside, ever-new knowledge to better understand the present and identify higher-value solutions for customers in the future.”
Enlightening, in this sense, is McKinsey’s vision for the development of the Academy: learning moves at the speed of business.
According to McKinsey, digitalization offers an enormous opportunity to transform learning and address some of its current shortcomings.
Gefran: from FLY to kenFLY, I can because I know
Reaching everyone, allowing everyone to grow, to learn and to be known. This is the goal of kenFLY, the innovative platform, the digital evolution of FLY Gefran Talent Academy, launched by the Italian multinational specializing in the design and production of sensors, systems and components for industrial automation and process control. Gefran is an international company present in major markets, with commercial and manufacturing subsidiaries in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the United States, Brazil, India, China and Singapore.
It is listed on the Milan Stock Exchange and currently has around 700 employees across 3 continents, speaking 11 languages and practicing 10 religions: the Academy — offered in English and Italian — allows people to share in, and enrich themselves through, the traits of different generations and cultures.
How Gefran’s Corporate Academy came about
FLY was launched back in 2017: “Training is a habit at Gefran,” says Patrizia Belotti, Chief People & Organization Officer, “we invest in people’s talent. When we launched the Talent Academy, the goal was to build ‘Gefran of tomorrow’, developing people’s talent and creating value today.”
2021 was the moment for kenFLY, whose development also involved Federico Bassignana, Employee Experience, Content Development & kenFLY Coordinator, who adds: “It is a digital platform through which employees can train their skills with no limits of space or time, a tool aimed at fostering dialogue between generations, and reverse mentoring.”
The name is itself a kind of ‘program’: “To ken — explains Belotti — has its origins in Old English and is used today in Scots dialect: it means I can because I know. We have created a virtual university campus that can be attended by everyone, all over the world; people form communities and meet in a single hub.”
To help everyone understand the meaning of the skills that can be trained through the learning paths, these have been broken down into the FLY Skills Matrix.
The Matrix is the common language used across the whole Group when talking about transversal skills in training, in recruitment, and in FLY Performance, Gefran’s Performance Management System. Specifically, there are 6 macro-areas of ability — intellectual, managerial, innovative, technical, emotional, relational — giving rise to a matrix of 32 skills that everyone can train, through articles, talks, and courses selected or created specifically by Gefran, supported by gamification.
Training also happens through gamification
In kenFLY, gamification accompanies users through their learning journey, through games and digital experiences involving 6 characters/archetypes (representing the traits of the areas in the Matrix), and the awarding of credits and badges to boost engagement and awareness of one’s own path.
“Using gamification,” Belotti concludes, “allows us to reduce cognitive load and fosters a culture that is open to making mistakes. Take problem solving, for example: the possibility of getting it wrong is not a deterrent, the game dimension allows people to ‘try things out’. In this way we have created a parallel world, appealing to every generation and open to every culture, in which we experiment without limits, maximizing learning and providing further useful input for the performance management of our people.”