Critical Disciplines to Grow Employer Partnerships Study
Find and secure best-fit employer partnerships
Carla Hickman, Vice President, Research
Read our publication for nine disciplines and five tools to match your COE unit with an employer, invest in that relationship, and deliver on goals.
Executive Summary: Critical disciplines to grow employer partnerships
As traditional sources of revenue become unpredictable, universities turn to COE units and employer partnerships to find new sources of enrollments and revenue. Counted among the most external-facing divisions on campus, COE units boast experience in serving mid-career professionals, delivery expertise in multiple modalities, and the ability to quickly innovate on program and credential design.
Identify best-fit partners
When considering potential partners, COE units often find themselves wasting considerable resources chasing hard-to-access, attractive brands. While this evaluation involves measuring both attractiveness and fit, institutions tend to overvalue brand attractiveness because determining fit can seem subjective and opaque.
Discipline 1: Mine internal data to identify prospective partners
Louisiana State University built a warm leads list of prioritized prospective partners by mining their open enrollment data. After noticing that companies were enrolling employees in disparate courses without considering how LSU could more holistically serve their needs, LSU staff began to routinely survey noncredit students.
LSU uses publicly available location and employee information about company prospects and combines it with key metrics gained from the open enrollment survey, including the number of employees any given company sends to training, their primary reason for enrollment, popular courses attended, the financial assistance rate, and company training spend. This corporate intelligence is then used to create customized sales pitches for the prioritized partners.
The University of Delaware takes a similar approach by referencing current employer engagement to identify warm leads. Business development staff created a one-page document outlining various ways corporate partners can engage with the institution, from executive education to technology products and career services. Staff at Delaware looked beyond what many institutions would classify as partnership activities, and were able to identify more than 400 employers with existing relationships to the institution. The vast majority of those employers had limited engagements with the college, which presented strong opportunities to upsell and expand the existing partnership.
Discipline 2: Advance a mission-centered, coordinated approach
While identifying warm leads is the first step to finding and engaging with best-fit partners, prioritizing among those leads is the next hurdle that institutions face. B2B marketers encounter difficulty in prioritizing among leads due to the high level of institutional support and coordination necessary to determine which partners are best fit for the university as a whole. Without this critical knowledge, COE units lack the building blocks needed to create a comprehensive outreach strategy that engages corporations at multiple touch points.
To break through institutional barriers, Rochester Institute of Technology created a Partnership Management Council (PMC) that brings together disparate campus units to create a holistic corporate outreach strategy. Conceived through a president’s charge, the PMC involves all externally facing unit leaders and holds quarterly data-sharing meetings. Once data has been shared, representatives from various campus units are able to identify relationship “owners” and strategize next steps.
Speed decision in a consensus purchase
Institutions often struggle to navigate the complexities of partnership with other large, decentralized organizations. Knowing who to contact within an organization is one of the biggest obstacles that institutions face when engaging in B2B sales. And given the complexity of today’s organizations, it is a rarity that just one person will have the ability to sign a deal.
Decision-making becomes more complicated when universities also consider the buy-in of other leaders within an organization. Finding consensus between executive buy-in and manager-level design input is key to ensuring that training programs provide maximum utility.
Discipline 3: Leverage labor intelligence to identify and motivate partners
In order to gain understanding of the complexity of organizational needs, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) selected the largest employers in local industries to participate in advisory boards. NOVA found that traditional, national labor market data sets may not capture the unique characteristics of regional employer demand. They decided to turn to their clients— employers—in order to validate data.
Once per quarter, NOVA’s workforce development division conducts labor market analysis on Burning Glass and open sources for general employer needs while simultaneously recording inbound training needs. They use this data to identify the employers that account for more than 60% of jobs in a particular field and invite them to sit on advisory boards. Feedback gathered from the advisory boards is used to validate labor market data and create a shared understanding of training needs.
Discipline 4: Provide a unified vision of partnership that addresses multiple influencers
The University of Delaware created an engagement menu that primes prospective partners for relationships with the institution. While most partnerships rely on discrete, engagement-specific relationships, Delaware’s engagement index allows the university to understand the broader scope of the employer’s relationship. With this context, Delaware is able to strategically target existing relationships to offer expanded engagements.
The “9 Means of Engagement” is a comprehensive document that outlines the different ways departments within a company could engage with the business school. Staff members bring the document to sales meetings to enrich conversations on engagement. If they are meeting with an L&D officer, they might emphasize executive education or custom training, since this position is primarily interested in employee skill development. In contrast, they could promote graduate student technology projects to a Chief Information Officer as a low-cost means to address existing IT challenges.
By leveraging this document, Delaware ensures that there are partnership options for functions across an organization to engage with the institution. This allows Delaware to move past the limits that come with a singular view of “partnership.”
Discipline 5: Hardwire needs-assessment into partnership development
Recognizing that initial sales meetings are often unproductive, as HR representatives are typically far removed from the business managers who hold critical context on training needs, the University of California – Irvine created a primer assessment that is circulated to prospective partners ahead of an introductory call.
The document lays out all the necessary information UC Irvine needs to create a high-quality custom training program, including basic company information, a detailed analysis of training needs, audience profile, and delivery preferences. It also frames the necessary information for the HR manager, who, while often in charge of liaising with the university, is rarely the person who initiates the training.
By arming partner stakeholders with key questions, UC Irvine staff enter introductory calls with detailed insights on the employer’s needs and the programs that could meet them. As a result, fewer calls and meetings are required to agree on a scope of partnership, effectively shortening the B2B sales cycle. They’re also able to lay out clear expectations, leading to higher satisfaction and renewability. The benefits on campus are substantial: 70% of corporate training revenue comes from repeat business.
Communicate the distinct value of higher education
While universities offer a broad array of subject expertise, teaching talent, and research infrastructure that few private providers can compete with, these benefits are lost on employers, who often struggle to navigate the complexity of higher education institutions to realize the full benefits of partnership.
Discipline 6: Create a single point of access to university network
B2B representatives face the continual challenge of articulating the value of the university as a training partner. Employer skepticism is not unfounded: universities are typically not the cheapest or most flexible option available in today’s crowded training market. While universities offer a broad array of subject expertise, teaching talent, and research infrastructure that few private providers can compete with, these benefits are lost on employers, who often struggle to navigate the complexity of higher education. Universities are simply not organized to facilitate easy access on the part of an employer.
In light of this challenge, the University of California – Irvine maintains a team of account managers who ensure that businesses are able to navigate internal bureaucracy to unlock the full value of a higher education partnership. These staff members handle the client relationship across its entire life span, driving deep relationships and renewed business while facilitating connections on campus for their industry partners.
Discipline 7: Embed employee-centered services to increase engagement
Companies increasingly seek flexible and inexpensive online training solutions, but their employees find it much harder to access personalized guidance as part of their career development. At the University of Delaware, business development staff members proactively include one-on-one coaching as part of proposals presented to employers for custom training programs.
Any corporate training proposal at the Lerner College of Business comes embedded with two or three hours of personalized coaching per employee. This presents a significant increase of cost per employee, but employers often accept at least a limited scope of the service because they’re able to see the embedded value rather than judge it as a line-item cost. While coaching is typically viewed as an executive-level perk, Delaware positions this service as a benefit for mid-career professionals. Coaching gives employees the chance to reflect on performance and receive individual feedback. Coaches typically build out a leadership development plan that extends beyond the existing training engagement with employee career goals in mind.
Even with a single hour of coaching, employees consistently rank their coaching hours as the most beneficial element of the training process. Employers themselves are so satisfied with the impact of coaching that 70% of repeat training requests include more coaching hours in the subsequent proposal.
Discipline 8: Offer on-site customer services to reduce coordinating costs and increase employee results
Rowan University takes personalized service in another direction by sending a team of institutional representatives to assist partner organizations’ employees with enrollment, financial aid, technical, and instructional support during the onboarding process.
Rowan’s Global Learning and Partnerships unit charges $500 per employee to bring support services on-site to their partner organization. By doing this, Rowan is able to remove a considerable work stream burden from HR staff. The convenience of having these supports on-site allows employees to better integrate their academic efforts with their day-to-day work. Most importantly, these on-site teams include academic support staff who can work with employees to ensure they stay on track in their courses.
Advocate to turn customers into fans
Successful B2B enterprises that cultivate strong partnerships reap the benefits of word-of-mouth messaging to create new business opportunities and build a sustainable partnership enterprise. Customer and employee referrals boast higher lead-to-deal conversion rates than other channels, including web presence, social media outreach, and traditional advertising.
For the best results, B2B marketers should cultivate their existing relationships and gain referrals through warm leads. Referrals equip marketers to approach a university partnership pitch with a greater sense of trust and value than cold leads offer.
Discipline 9: Amplify messages of partnership success through end-user networks
Progressive institutions rely on their carefully cultivated network and the power of word-of-mouth marketing to grow their footprint. Word-of-mouth marketing is a key feature at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where strategic, multilevel advisory boards inform curricular innovation and partnership sourcing.
Georgia Tech dominated headlines with their 2014 launch of an online computer science master’s program that was supported in part by a three million-dollar gift from AT&T. Behind the headlines, however, this was a partnership in name only. AT&T’s gift came with no strings attached for the university, and while numerous AT&T employees did enroll, the vast majority of students came from partner employers who did not invest in the program. This outsized success came in large part from Georgia Tech’s targeted and structured use of advisory boards at all levels of engagement.
Implementation toolkit
To aid in implementation of these critical disciplines, please use the following tools to navigate the most complex portions of the partnership process. The toolkit contains five items to assist your professional, online, and adult education unit find and secure best-fit employer partnerships.
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