What is an Academy?

Academies have existed for hundreds of years, such as the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, founded in 1741. According to the Royal Engineers Museum, its purpose was to provide an education and produce “good officers of Artillery and perfect Engineers.” A few centuries on, the academy brand is strong in both the private and public sector and it’s estimated there are over 2,000 worldwide.

Whether they’re called an Academy, College, Corporate University or Development Centre, we all know what they are. Don’t we?

In the world of education, academies are a hot topic. They started as a solution for failing schools but now the UK government is looking to expand the scope to drive standards. These academies put more power in the hands of head teachers to tailor how the schools run for the children they serve. In education, the word “academy” means something – it’s a status and certain rules apply.

In parallel, while there are no rules on what you can call an academy, many traditional training functions have been re-branded as academies. Take the Fujitsu Learning Academy for example. After taking over a struggling company that had under-invested in HR services, they set out to re-brand the training function as an academy. But rather than carry on like before, Roger Leek, the new HR director’s view was “if you go on a public programme you go away with probably 50% of what you need” so instead they designed a tailored programme to their specific needs.

While academies come in all shapes and sizes, they’ve often been set up to fix something that’s not working, reinvigorate a learning culture, make sure learning is tailored to the people that need it and ultimately to drive standards and people’s performance at work. Dare I say – as someone working in a central learning function – in some cases it might also be about a department wanting more power over the strategy for learning and development of its people?

Working in the wider public sector and civil service, I’ve come across over a dozen academies – ranging from an online space about working digitally, to those with their own buildings offering learning on a range of topics. A lot of them have had a visible impact – with people going back to work and doing things better. To protect and promote the most successful models, I ask you and myself: is it worth setting some rules around what an academy is? Or does that stifle local accountability for business performance and innovation? The last thing I’d want to do is stop something better coming along.

Fortunately, I’m ‘not in charge’, so I don’t have to answer those questions. But I am passionate about making sure we (as a learning and development community of practice) share what we know works and promote what good learning looks like. So here are my thoughts on the foundations for building a successful academy.

Clarity of purpose and identity

Ken Fee points out in his article on Corporate Universities that the “first thing you need to ask yourself…is why?” He suggests asking yourself these questions:

•  What do you need it for?
• What will it do?
• What are its aims?

These questions aren’t just important for the team building the academy; without these foundations, then your customers won’t get it either.

Too broad a scope and you might just be re-branding the entire learning and development offer for your organisation (but you won’t have fundamentally changed anything). Too narrow, and you might not be able to deliver people with all the capabilities they need to do their jobs effectively now and in the future.

Some further questions to help make sure the purpose and scope of an academy is clear might be:

• How will success be measured?
• What already exists? Why doesn’t it work? What does work?
• What professions are involved or could be involved?
• What collection of learning topics are we bringing together? Reviewing them, are they eclectic or very narrow?

If you reflect on these questions and find your ambitions are too broad and/or eclectic, then you might want to consider if it is an academy your organisation needs. Too narrow? Perhaps it will be more efficient and you can reduce cost and effort by building learning programmes hosted on existing infrastructure instead.

When you’re thinking about what success looks like, remember that a smaller number of targeted, high-quality and highly-used learning products will have a greater impact and return on investment.

As well as purpose, an academy needs a clear identify. Identify is about much more than a logo – it’s the tone, language, professionalism, online presence and marketing strategy all wrapped up. We (those of us outside of the Communications and PR professions) all think we can ‘have a go’ at doing this ourselves. But the truth is most of us can’t and most of us shouldn’t. Our internal customers get frustrated and confused by different brands of functions within an organisation. I’m afraid you care about your logo – the symbol of your hard work and effort – much more than your customers do. So make sure it lines up with the identity of the rest of your organisation and its values.

Project management and infrastructure

 When you’re doing anything big, programme management is vital or things will go wrong. I can’t add any original guidance here. Your organisation most likely provides learning on project management and the internet is abundant with guidance.

What I can share are some dos and don’ts from my own experience working with academies…

Do:

• Make sure you’ve got one senior sponsor
• Make clear roles and responsibilities for the team and sponsors
• Set clear objectives
• Map out all your stakeholders and talk to them all
• Think about the professions you’ll need on the project team and have them all there before you start – forget digital and technology colleagues at your own peril
• Get a marketing and PR professional in early, don’t get carried away doing it yourself
• Create a project plan and make sure everyone has visibility of it
• Talk all the time – monthly meetings won’t cut it, you need to catch up daily
• Think about governance in the longer-term – the academy will need to evolve with your organisations needs
• Think about your academy as a business – think about the market you’re in and what others have done that works
• Start small and grow. It’s easier to perfect your operations with a smaller offer (and fewer customers) than it is once you’ve got business booming
• Be collaborative and co-design with your customers and stakeholders
• Be prepared to change your plan.

Don’t:

• Forget any of the Dos
• Set a launch date with out a project plan or resource in place. You will end up spending money inefficiently, your products will not meet be the best quality and you’ll be constantly crisis managing. There’s a balance to be had between set deliverables and agility that will put you on the right track
• Forget procurement can take time, especially in the pubic sector
• Think you need to start with a big bang. You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. Yes, you need a formal launch – but why use up all of your ability to tell your customers about new developments in one hit?
• Circumvent difficult stakeholders but do hold them to account for supporting the academies vision. Ultimately, they’re stakeholders for a reason – they have a stake in the success of the academy
• Be uninformed customers. Make sure you know who in the market might deliver for you and what their drivers are. Look to set up contracts with the right incentives – let them make a profit but not at the expense of your aims
• Be afraid to challenge upwards. Senior stakeholders might have more general experience (possibly helped out by the ideas and promises of suppliers who they’ve met) but you bring expertise and depth of knowledge. They won’t thank you for saying “I told you so” at the end.

Where you can use existing infrastructure that is already maintained, do. If you do need to put in infrastructure from scratch, you may need:

• learning management system
• learner record stores
• content management systems (website)
• booking systems
• payment systems (for taking payment, raising purchase orders and invoicing)
• contract management systems
• trainer scheduling systems (unless you outsource)
• a database of coaches/mentors
• collaboration and social media tools (for academy staff, suppliers and learners)
• help-desk with a telephone number and email address
• case management system (linked to relevant knowledge for those manning the help-desk) for dealing with queries, bookings and complaints by telephone and email
• APIs to other systems in your HR department, with supplier systems and your IT department
• survey/evaluation tools and data-analysis staff
• assessment centre status/links with awarding bodies and their systems
• financial arrangements with suppliers for courses that don’t achieve the minimum contracted numbers and those that do (unders/overs pots).

This list is not exhaustive but it does paint a picture of the budget and resource requirements for both setting up the academy and on-going maintenance of it.

Funding

 You’ll need to establish funding arrangements and a commercial model for your academy. You could centrally fund everything and offer ‘free’ delivery to your learners, recover costs from usage of the academy or offer a blend.

 Starting up is likely to be expensive (infrastructure, design, resource, piloting) so it’s likely your academy will need to run for several years to achieve a return on investment. In the current and future economy, both public and private sector organisations need to evolve to meet their customers’ needs. So will academies. Successful academies are likely to be self-funding in the longer-term, with a margin in pricing for learners that goes towards continuous improvement of its products and services.

Access

Whether you’re in one office building, a multinational or part of the civil service, your users will want to access the academy digitally. In the civil service, digital-by-default applies to internal services too.

Look at what digital infrastructure already exists. User-research with civil servants confirms what (as users ourselves) we already know: having multiple systems and passwords is confusing and annoying. That’s why the governments Commercial College and Finance Academy both opted to be hosted on the Civil Service Learning platform.

There’s certainly also value in getting groups of people together so they can learn from each other and network. Physical locations can also go some way in creating an identify for an academy.

But first, look at what physical estates already exist and can be used for multiple purposes. As attractive as a (metaphorical) gold plaque above the door might be, it’s going to cost you and make achieving return on investment more of a challenge. The greatest single-expense-line of your academy (if it involved face-to-face delivery and networking) will be venue costs. If you buy or lease a venue outright, then you’ll need to make sure it’s utilised 99% of the time to not be wasting money. Glamorous business school estates might “wow” but they also come at a premium so you might want to consider contracting venues separately.

Leadership programme providers often promote the benefits of residential programmes because they give senior leaders and professionals an opportunity to network and build teams. This is true but it’s also important to make sure your access to the academy is inclusive. For example, parents and carers may find they’re excluded from residential events and/or if they’d have to travel too far.

You can still achieve brand identity without one static location for your academy. Large banners, branded stationary and training material are significantly less expensive and – together with wider geographical reach of your academy – arguably more effective. Conference and training suite providers are used to training material being delivered in advance of events and can be contracted to set up venues however you like.

Curriculum and qualifications

The purpose and scale of your academy will determine whether you have one or multiple curricula.

A curriculum can be made up from (but not limited to) workshops, online learning, public courses, accredited programmes, recommended on-the-job learning activities, case studies and/or blends.

A curriculum might be for an entire profession (for example, HR) or for a certain topic (for example, leading large projects).

You should think about how the curriculum:

• will meet all the principles of what good learning looks like
• can be structured in a way that makes sense to your customers
• can be tiered (for example, awareness, working-level, practitioner or expert)
• links to standards and competencies
• links to career pathways
• might be accredited and use the qualifications and credit framework.

Curricula should continually improve and evolve with what your organisation needs from the workforce your academy caters for. Therefore you might want to put governance in place in the form of a curriculum and qualifications board. Membership of such a board should include learning and development expertise, subject matter expertise, intelligent customers (service users) and potentially academic representation from a professional body.

Equally important to the structured curriculum, a good academy will offer a coaching and mentoring service and should promote opportunities to acquire experience and knowledge outside a training environment. For example, secondments, industry interchanges, internal job swaps, project work and working for short periods in another industry sector.

Evaluation and accreditation

For an academy to have longevity, it has got to show it is fit for purpose, successful and offers return on investment. As the CIPD reports, this is a challenge.

Showing an offer is fit for purpose can be achieved by working with relevant professional bodies and academic institutions to accredit the learning offered. City & Guilds (one of the largest accreditation providers in the UK) explain the benefits of accreditation include external quality recognition, ability to attract and recruit talent, reduce risk (by demonstrating competence to regulators) and make employees feel their employer is investing in their careers.

Academies need to evaluate their learning and performance, so performance indicators need to be in place for the curriculum, service and finances. Indicators might include (but are not limited to):

•  Utilisation of products
• Year on-year growth (overall customer numbers and by product/service)
• Learner ratings for courses
• Pass rates on accredited learning
• Drop-out rates (reverse KPI)
• Events achieving minimum numbers
• Complaints
• Duplicate help-desk queries
• Customer advocacy on brand, relevance and impact (from survey data)
• Financial/budget performance
• Profit margins (funds that go back in to service improvement and learning design).

Career pathways

If your academy caters to professions and has broad enough reach, you might want to consider creating career pathways or work with those responsible for talent management to make sure any pathways that exist align and link to the academy’s offer.

Pathways should promote both upwards progression and lateral development. Career pathways may include the opportunity to gain recognised qualifications and the academies curriculum may be able to support learners with qualifications.