Back to school
Innovative programs reach out to nontraditional students

by Heather B. Hayes
for Virginia Business
July 2006

Traditionally, executive education programs catered to, well, executives — usually high-powered, Fortune 500 managers on the way up. There wasn’t much interest in people like Barbara DeButts, a stay-at-home mom of 10 years, who wanted to re-enter the executive ranks.

A former corporate strategy specialist for Hewlett Packard who holds an MBA, DeButts didn’t need help with management skills. She needed a boost to her confidence and help with writing a résumé that would account for a decade-long gap in employment. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was to try and write a résumé after 10 years of not working,” she says.

Last fall, DeButts, a McLean resident, turned to the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, her alma mater, and took a seminar through Alumni Career Services for women who wanted to get back to work — on their own terms. The program has been so popular that the school is considering a more formal and extensive executive education course that would target the needs of former executives trying to return to employment after a lengthy break. In DeButts’ case, she found the job she was looking for only a month later, hiring on as a well-compensated but part-time market development consultant for Arlington-based Cowan & Associates.

Targeting stay-at-home moms and the unemployed may seem like an exotic strategy for revenue-hungry executive education programs, but officials at these schools increasingly are reaching out to executives that represent nontraditional demographics and seeing them as critical to their future growth.

The Executive Education Program at the College of William & Mary, for example, now offers open and customized courses that meet the unique needs of military officials running bases and exchange stores. Meanwhile, the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business is in the process of designing noncredit workshops for the legal and medical communities. Old Dominion University (ODU) is targeting the emerging government contractor market in the Hampton Roads area. And George Mason University hopes to get an executive education program under way by 2007 in response to demand from the government contractor community in Northern Virginia.

Additionally, executive education officials are marketing their courses to sole proprietors, technology specialists, education administrators and nonprofit managers.

“ The thing is, we need to find new markets,” says David Newkirk, Darden’s CEO of executive education. “Traditionally, we were about giving MBA skills to non-MBAs in big corporations, but that’s a shrinking market. More and more people have MBAs. More and more people work outside of the big corporations. And so if we as an industry want to grow, we have to look beyond what we normally have.”

In other words, executive education has to change its formula. In years past, many programs had a tendency to give students only what faculty wanted to teach. But now, Newkirk says, most programs, including Darden’s, are flipping their priorities, actually surveying potential students, finding out what they need and responding with teaching materials and courses that can meet those needs.

Executive education officials at William & Mary, for instance, developed and marketed their military-specific courses after doing an extensive market analysis of the Tidewater region. One thing they learned from that study was the importance of being adaptable. “We now try to be very flexible and willing to change at a moment’s notice, because, of course, the military’s requirements can change so rapidly,” says program director Rosanna Koppelmann.

Moreover, the survey found that military organizations were interested in learning about management topics outside the realm of traditional teaching. Currently, the most popular courses for military officers within the William & Mary Executive Education Program don’t cover principles of accounting and marketing but rather deal with strategic retail planning and Lean Six Sigma training. The latter is a popular management methodology that provides tools to make processes more efficient and improve the bottom line. “For them, that’s really important because they’re dealing with taxpayer dollars, so they want to figure out the smartest and most effective way to make those dollars go farther,” explains Koppelmann, noting that the program has provided course work to a number of Army, Navy and Marine Corps leaders, as well as civilian contractors.

The military, in fact, is one of the fastest-growing patrons of executive education and not just on the Peninsula. Military organizations have tapped Darden’s executive education program to design courses related to sustainability, contract sourcing and personal leadership development, as well as general management topics that deal specifically with the issue of interaction between military entities and commercial companies.

Darden is also reaching out to another government entity: public schools. The school is working with the Curry Partnership for Leaders and Education and just received a $5 million grant from the Wallace Foundation to provide principals, superintendents and school board members with training on appraisal, feedback, goal-setting and other management topics as they seek to turn around the financial performance of their schools. “What we’ve done is taken classic executive leadership skills and re-purposed them so they could apply in a school situation,” says Newkirk.

UR’s Robins School of Business decided to target the legal and medical community after discussions with alumni and local leaders. They helped identify that the fast-growing interest among professionals in those fields is obtaining a better understanding of business operations. “We think that the best business principles ought to be applied in social sectors, just as they are in the for-profit world,” says Richard S. Coughlan, associate dean for the school’s graduate and executive programs.

He notes that the courses cover traditional executive education topics such as communications, leadership and strategic planning but are tailored to the specific industries involved. They will be offered for the first time in early 2007.

UR’s executive education program picked up on the changing marketplace and the need to expand its horizons earlier than a lot of other institutions. As a result of strong community outreach and marketing efforts, demand for its courses has been growing by double digits over the last two years.

In a competitive global environment “business and organization leaders are recognizing that if they are not keeping up with the best practices in management, they’re bound to fall behind,” observes Coughlan. “So, many of them have recognized that staying in touch with higher education in a formal way and staying up-to-date in their knowledge and skills can be a real competitive advantage.”

Even nonprofits are getting attention these days. UR provides leadership training for a number of nonprofit organizations, including the Virginia Police Chiefs Foundation, the William Byrd Community House and the Historic Richmond Foundation. And its Excellence Series for Small Business Owners — a public course developed in partnership with the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce — has been drawing owners of some well-known, long-standing Richmond companies, including Andy Thornton, co-owner of La Différence, a retail furniture store.

Even though he has been running his business for 26 years, Thornton decided to enroll after hearing early participants rave about the coursework. “I know a lot about our business, but there were certain skill sets that I have never really been able to implement like a lot of the strategic planning principles,” he explains. Thornton found that the commitment and time away from his business was well worth it. “There’s a lot more discipline now, and it’s been something that I can take to the management team to not only give them a new set of tools but also an understanding as to why we do some of the things we do.”

Still, simply reaching out to new groups is not necessarily going to be enough to drive demand. Many less-traditional populations such as sole proprietors, unemployed executives and even small-business owners may not have the financial resources to enroll in executive education. And busy managers and small-business owners have already indicated that they want as much impact as possible in a tight timeframe.

University officials are sensitive to these needs and are working to tweak courses and schedules to make it easier — and more cost-effective — for new students to take advantage of their offerings. “Many of these managers and small-business owners have always been interested in continuing their education and adding to their skill sets,” says Sheila Powell, director of the Executive Development Center at ODU. “But they don’t have a lot of time, and they’re not all that interested in heading off for a month-long course. They want something that’s convenient and that fits into their work schedule.”