The New Horizons of Corporate Academies

We live in an era in which artificial intelligence, information, and employee creativity are crucial factors in defining companies’ strategic direction. Technological advances push every industry to redefine and innovate, often radically changing their business models.

In a context where technology and innovation drive change, it is essential that companies focus on engaging and developing their employees to maintain a lasting competitive advantage.

Therefore, organizations face a new internal challenge: the need to define a new People Strategy that enhances each individual employee’s uniqueness, enriching and evolving the entire corporate ecosystem.

Within this context, Corporate Academies play a fundamental role. Already considered a pillar of corporate strategies and seen as a must-have tool for its employees’ upskilling and reskilling processes, they are becoming the “new place” for sharing corporate identities and values, increasingly personalized to the needs of each employee.

Starting from this scenario, as OpenKnowledge, we explored an aspect that today has become the cornerstone of this evolution: the Purpose of an organizations.

As mentioned through the research in our HBR article, “Purpose as the north star of organization” we understand it as the “raison d’être” of a company, raises the value aspect by focusing on the long-term involvement of employees on the loyalty of customers and the social and environmental impact (Sica 2023).

From this perspective, we can consider the Corporate Academies among the enablers of this strategy and, at the same time, a fundamental tool for expressing the Purpose itself.

We no longer see Academies just as places of learning but as places where a Purpose comes to life, shaping the way employees learn, grow, and actively contribute to the evolution and success of the organization.

We believe that Purpose can be the North Star capable of guiding the value proposition of each Corporate Academy, pushing it to go beyond the boundaries of the company in which it was born and bring added value to the entire ecosystem. At the center of this ecosystem, there are always people, the heart of the organization and the starting point for defining a People Strategy that is sustainable, inclusive, and innovative. Their involvement becomes crucial in creating alignment between the individual and organizational spheres. Only by doing so it is possible to give value to heterogeneity and consequently act in a complete and harmonious direction within the entire employee experience.

Building a Purpose-driven Academy means creating a tool that is, in all respects, the first touchpoint in which to immerse yourself: guided by the WHY (raison d’être of the organization), it was created to be the meeting point between people’s training needs and the company’s values ​​and objectives. This blend can generate value within the entire ecosystem, becoming a source of exchange and innovation.

Each aspect plays a key role in creating a Purpose-driven Academy: organizations must involve all the necessary internal and external stakeholders. This establishes growth paths that enable a Purpose, starting from the intersection between training needs, values, identity, and the company’s brand.

Only by broadening our gaze from training towards the entire employee experience will we be able to plan a complete journey in all its facets guided by a value proposition specific to the Academy, which is strong and commonly shared.

The ultimate goal is to provide people with a space to experiment, cooperate, and evolve together to create an impact that generates 360° value from inside the company to the outside (and vice versa).

A well-organized and solid Purpose-driven Academy also makes an organic and timely update of the dedicated training offer possible by leveraging tangible KPIs and monitorable metrics that can restore the value of the Academy’s impact on the entire ecosystem.

Building a Purpose-driven Academy means going beyond defining a taxonomy of skills.

In other words, it means having a tool capable of bridging the skill gap and also helpful in spreading culture and knowledge, fostering alignment between the values ​​and aspirations of the employee and the values ​​and objectives of the organization in a continuous process that generates exchange, growth, and innovation.

It means implementing a personalized training offer based on daily work challenges, drawing from both inside and outside the corporate reality, where people are active protagonists.

It is through a clear Purpose (which permeates and guides the construction of Corporate Academies), a flexible learning ecosystem and an increasingly strong attention to the integration of technological innovations, that companies will be able to respond to the new challenges posed by the current scenario. Here, it is crucial to maintain high employee engagement, with direct and tangible effects in terms of results and positioning.

Stefania Bonapace e Rocco Fontana