Business is booming: so too is the need for lifelong education to stay career competitive. Americans spend over $210 billion a year on adult post-secondary education and training. Small wonder then that corporations, who spend a lot on training, are looking to the Internet to deliver lifelong education and training to far-flung work forces.
Web-based training programs interest the business world for several reasons. First, they promise to drastically lower education costs by eliminating the need for expensive travel to remote locations to learn specialized skills. Second, the Internet promises to provide a quick and efficient communication platform for globally dispersed work forces.
This last issue interests corporations because once they train one division -- say their Pacific Rim division -- they are then faced with the additional headache and expense of training the Midwestern team on the same issues. Internet educational tools like live chat, bulletin board style discussion groups, streaming video, and Web article archives can bring the knowledge and expertise of one division right to the desktop of another.
Knowledge Management on the Web
The Fielding Institute, a private graduate school in Santa Barbara, California, offers one of the most creative virtual degree programs for HR types. What distinguishes Fielding's distance learning Master's in Organizational Design & Effectiveness is not just that the degree is taught on the World Wide Web. Also distinct at Fielding is the idea that the time has come to teach HR types virtual business communication skills -- how to purposefully use new educational technology platforms to facilitate corporate knowledge sharing.
The field of organizational design is not new. The study of organizational design is the study of how people learn to work together in large corporate groups. It's group psychology, of a sort. OD, as the field is called for short, is all about how to build corporate infrastructures or "societies" where people feel a sense of belonging, motivation, and productivity.
At Fielding's distance learning master's program, launched in 1997, all students study the new psychology of "electronic communication" -- how managers can build productive virtual work teams. At the end of their master's degree students can even go on to earn a specialized Certificates in Online Group Process & Dynamics or Online Conflict Management.
Why Earn Your HR Degree Online?
Why earn your graduate degree online? Fielding's answer to that question is that we live in a global society where more and more communication will occur electronically rather than face-to-face. Those who master online communication can expect to enjoy the career benefits of having unique business skills for use in the next century.
Fielding's distance learning graduate program, which has a heavy emphasis on global communication, brings together learners and faculty from Europe, Canada, the USA, and South Africa. Students begin their studies by convening in either Santa Barbara, California or Santa Fe, New Mexico for a 3-day orientation. They then return to their countries of origin to study with each other via electronic seminars.
Just Getting Started in HR?
If HR is new to you, or you studied some other area in college, and now want to buckle down and learn HR lingo, browse Penn State's distance learning program.
Penn started offering home study courses over 100 years ago. That's right: a century ago. Of course 100 years ago distance learning was not delivered on the Net to urban professionals. It was delivered in mail bags on horse-drawn buckboards to farmers who wanted to learn better agricultural techniques.
Penn State still offers courses for farmers -- including a home study course on cottage cheese making! - but they also offer an impressive line of business education at-a-distance.
Penn's six-course Certificate in Human Resources is a good starting point for anyone looking to master the fundamental issues of HR as a career field or a discrete job function. Studies include a survey course in the field of HR with complimentary courses in Leadership & Motivation, Management & Organizational Psychology, and general psychology and sociology. Courses cost about $345 each.
If you're intrigued by the psychology of how corporations work, and how people work together in groups, many distance learning programs offer discrete courses in the psychology of organizational behavior and design.
E-mail Oklahoma State University (OSU), ics-inf@okway.okstate.edu, for a catalog of their independent study courses, which include Organizational Behavior & Management and Organizational Theory & Development. OSU courses are a bargain at about $210 each.
This article originally appeared on Monster.com.
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