The brilliant aspect of academies and educational programs is their potential to improve numerous facets of your business, far beyond the obvious upskilling of your team. To be truly innovative, organisations need to foster a growth mindset and nurture a widespread culture of learning. (Semi-)structured academies in-house can be an excellent tool to inspire these elements. Cost-effective, strategic, and impactful, they are the future of business learning and growth.
“Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”
Malcolm X
Key benefits of such academies may include:
- Team Development
- Knowledge Management
- Cultural Impact
- Employer Branding & Recruiting
- Employee Perk
- ROI – Risk Reduction
Let’s look at each of them closer:
Team Development
The most apparent benefit of (semi-)structured education programs and corporate academies is the accelerated skill development of participants. We also encourage your employees‘ involvement as trainers because whenever one teaches, two learn. It presents an excellent opportunity for aspiring leaders to get involved, offering numerous opportunities to improve soft skills and foster team growth.
Knowledge Management
A significant side effect of academies and education programs is the creation of highly relevant materials that everyone can use and build upon. Particularly when your team members participate as trainers, they have a compelling reason to distil, document, and present essential knowledge, proving helpful in various scenarios, from onboarding to process guidelines and best practice collections.
Cultural Impact
An in-house academy inherently fosters a learning culture in your organisation. It highlights your investment and focus on learning, positioning the concept of learning at the forefront of everyone’s mind. The academy’s format also provides an excellent platform to shape and advance your organisational culture and team cohesion and encourage meaningful conversations about learning.
Employer Branding & Recruiting
Learning and growth opportunities are key motivators for employees. A rich offer of development opportunities thus contributes to successful employer branding and recruiting efforts. An academy also creates incredibly shareable marketing content, and an education program can serve as a great entry point for new candidates or even as an extended assessment centre.
Employee Perk
In-house education programs and academies can be leveraged as an internal perk that many team members will appreciate. It contributes to employee retention and satisfaction, with education time being a perk that benefits everyone simultaneously.
ROI – Risk Reduction
The numerous benefits of academies culminate in a potent mix of return on investment and risk reduction. Depending on the program’s design, this balance can be achieved through increased employee retention, enhanced efficiency via upskilling and knowledge management, marketing contributions, improved candidate selection if used as an onboarding experience, and more. Although it’s not always easy to quantify, if goals are set properly from the outset, the ROI of academies can be measured well enough to satisfy even the most KPI-driven organisations.
Conclusions
In-house academies can serve as an effective tool to establish a learning culture and growth mindset, both of which are crucial for innovation.
Depending on your goals, academies can be customised to enhance team development and skills, knowledge management, culture, employer branding, recruiting, employee perks, and your ROI.
Looking for an example? Take a look at our case study on how we co-created and facilitated Sportradar’s Marketing Academy.
