At Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, a growing portfolio of corporate partnerships is burnishing a brand

Relationships between schools and the business world are nothing new; they have underpinned academic institutions for decades. But a new kind of corporate partnership that is increasingly aligned with market needs has been gaining speed, leading to programs that successfully serve organizations, their employees and universities alike.

Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management fosters corporate partnerships that feed into a growing suite of certificate programs catering to working professionals. Offering certificates in an online format allows the school to fulfill a dual mission, improving students’ career prospects and reaching a wider audience, says Jon Lehman, a former investor and entrepreneur who is now faculty director of executive education at the school.

“It broadens the number of people we can reach. It provides us flexibility. And it does a lot to expand our ability to go after that fundamental thing, which is how we improve a student’s management skills to change the shape of their career trajectory.”

Partners in dozens of industries

Vanderbilt Business is one of the country’s leading business schools, with a particular strength in healthcare management. Its executive education program offers an array of short programs and custom classes designed for professionals already in the workplace. A couple of years ago, its leaders began working with AllCampus, an online program management (OPM) provider, to support online learning and improve accessibility opportunities for their programs. While Vanderbilt Business supplies the expert faculty and curriculum content, AllCampus assists with student services, registration and marketing. “It was a paradigm shift for us,” Lehman says. “AllCampus brought expertise we didn’t have in the online arena.”

The school has recently begun to offer certificates that allow managers to increase their knowledge and gain additional qualifications. These are busy professionals, similar to students who would take an internal leadership development program, Lehman says. “They’re not first-timers, they’re not trying to credential themselves to get a job. They are mid-career, let’s say 25 to 40-year-old range,” he says. “They’re already there. They’re basically trying to up their game.”

Corporate partnerships can take different forms, but generally an organization gains access to a university’s programs and makes them available to employees as part of its educational and professional development offerings. Many schools, including Vanderbilt University, have their own extensive networks of corporate connections in place.

AllCampus has complemented these established relationships with its partner network of 4,000 organizations across dozens of industries, an excellent reputation and broad market reach. The partnership works on an underlying revenue-sharing model. In addition to enabling broader access and keeping tuition costs down through greater efficiency, AllCampus has contributed more than $1.5 million to corporate employees to advance their education. What’s more, AllCampus offers some educational programs to organizations at no cost, giving both employees and their families the opportunity to take part. More than 11,000 students have earned degrees and certificates through its corporate partner program.

Tailored to the market

Communication with industry stakeholders through those corporate partnerships can work both ways, improving a program’s design. When Vanderbilt Business was developing a new certificate in healthcare management, Kevin Schembri, the director of corporate partnerships at AllCampus, facilitated a meeting between its leaders and senior executives at NYC Health + Hospitals.

The school had already begun its own market research as it developed the program, tapping expert views on what support professionals in the healthcare sector should be prepared to provide. It was an excellent fit: Vanderbilt Business already had an MBA with a concentration in healthcare and a Master of Management in Health Care. In addition, Vanderbilt University is home to a highly-regarded medical center.

But healthcare is a bewilderingly broad field, says Lehman, who worked in the sector before launching Vanderbilt Business’s first healthcare program 17 years ago.

A certificate in healthcare management could evolve in all sorts of ways. “It could go to biotech, it could focus on hospital management or somewhat broader care delivery,” he observes. “You also have to pick the level of individual that you’re going after: is this for senior, middle or for an entry-level audience? Some programs are physician-focused, for example, so there are lots of things you need to think about.”

In the meeting the Vanderbilt Business team asked what skill-sets NYC Health + Hospitals was seeking. “We discussed what they were looking to build, and then bounced that off of the NYC Health + Hospitals organizational learning team, and said, ‘What do you think?’

These discussions with executives at NYC Health + Hospitals—and other experts in the field—helped Lehman and his colleagues refine the program. Early feedback on its design from industry players has been uniformly positive, Lehman says. “The general response was: we want that program.”

A win for business, schools and students

By giving employees access to educational opportunities, partnerships between corporations and universities enable those organizations to attract high-caliber talent. They also allow companies to effectively upskill their workforce so that workers can move around internally with ease. “It helps organizations and prevents them from having to downsize, pay severances, rehire, retrain,” Schembri says. “It’s an opportunity to help organizations be more efficient.”

For schools, it’s a win as well. “Universities get access to this great market, where the financial burden might be less because the students are employed, and/or they have tuition benefits that help pay for school.”

And these students receive an experience that can permanently improve their career path, Lehman says. The certificates add an educational layer to their resume and provide them with a talking point for interviews. They also—and most crucially, to Lehman—expand their knowledge in their field. “They understand financial statements, they are better at project management and they understand how to communicate better. All of those things come into play in terms of their trajectory.”

Meeting the needs of a dynamic world

Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management’s executive education team is planning to increase the number of online certificates available to its corporate partners. For Lehman, a couple of reasons explain why the certificate format works so well, starting with a tight labor market in which employers want to invest in workers and improve their skills. “There’s a drive and underlying demand,” he says.

The pandemic had already accelerated the move towards online learning, leaving both schools and students more comfortable with hybrid models. “All of that kind of went into the stew, to say: there are new opportunities opening up,” he says.

Certificates are likely to form an increasingly important part of some schools’ broader income streams, strengthening institutional resilience in an era of financial uncertainty. For Schembri and AllCampus, corporate partnerships supporting certificate programs represent a meaningful union of institutions that address skills gaps in the U.S. market, yielding positive outcomes for all involved. It’s an example of what Schembri describes as, “organizations, industry and education, partnering to make sure education meets the needs of a growing and dynamic world.”

This content was paid for and created by AllCampus. The editorial staff of The Chronicle had no role in its preparation. Find out more about paid content.