Building and Sustaining

How would you build and sustain a technical continuing education program (TCEP) that would be positioned as a critical core value, not just an employee benefit, within an organization? Additionally, how would you assure that this program maintained its critical core value status within that organization long after the founding innovators and champions who instilled passion and vision into it are retired from the scene? In other words, how would you imbed this program into the organization's cultural make-up? This article outlines the mission, core values, and operating philosophy of such a program that answers these two questions with inputs and conclusions from two main sources. The first source is the chronicled experience gained from the General Motors Technical Education Program (TEP) from inception through growth and cultural acceptance as a core value within General Motors Corporation (GM). This program captured over 30 national and international awards, realized over $300M in cost savings, generated multiple patents, survived the GM bankruptcy, and outlived Pontiac, SAAB, Saturn, and Oldsmobile all within a twenty five year span. But it was by no means ideal and necessitated flexibility, continuous improvement and planned innovation in areas vital to sustaining strength in its core value positioning. Still, it possessed strong and admirable attributes that help comprise the TCEP model presented here. The second source is a compilation and synthesis of the strengths of over 650 technical continuing education programs operated by other national and international organizations. These are articulated by nine universities with successful, high-quality distance learning continuing education program experiences with these same organizations. The criterion for selection for strengths within the TCEP model are based on sound evidence that these strengths would spell the difference between survival and death in periods of sever budget cuts where core value priority rather than "favorite son" positioning is the real and only measure of the final result. These two sources of input combine to provide the components for a TCEP model program that has greater potential for long term impact and sustainability than any individual participant program. Some of the results presented in this paper will likely be anticipated by the reader. Some may be surprising. But all of the conclusions capsulated within the resultant model contribute to an impactful and sustainable program.