Built to Last: Custom Programs are the Foundation for 21st Century Growth
Designing and implementing a customized education program for a company is no small task. Read about the custom academy McCombs created for Royal Dutch Shell.
By Pam Losefsky
Teaching in a custom-designed executive education program is many a professor’s dream job: bright, capable students; vast opportunities to add to one’s personal teaching repertoire and research agenda; and classrooms in exotic locales (or at least outside the normal institutional setting).
It’s also an incredible amount of work. Building custom educational programs is a business in which experience counts exponentially. With more than 50 years’ worth of executive education experience, the McCombs School is among the most sought-after providers of custom executive education programs in the United States. McCombs counts such world class companies as 3M, Banco do Brasil, Dell Computer, Hatachi, IBM, Motorola-China and Vitro among its distinguished client list. But it isn’t a fact that a school with exceptional undergrad and graduate programs is automatically a desirable provider of education for executives. First, says Chantal Delys, assistant dean of executive education, the school must understand how to develop programs that meet very specific company goals.
“That means there’s a lot of up-front work with the company, assessing its needs and coming to understand its perspective,” she says. Second, professors need to anticipate and prepare for the fast-moving, high-level discussions that occur in a classroom full of managers and executives—discussions that are steps above what might occur in an MBA classroom. And finally, professors need to put more emphasis on practice, as opposed to theory.
Through a half-century of experience in executive education, McCombs professors have come to excel at all of these things.
So a few years ago when Royal Dutch Shell began casting about in search of educational institutions capable of delivering what may very well have become the world’s largest custom executive education initiative, it’s no surprise that, within short order, it found McCombs.
The Shell Project Academy
The Shell Project Academy, or SPA, as it’s now called, has engaged two technical universities and two business schools on three continents to develop and implement a training program for a couple thousand Royal Dutch Shell project managers in locations as far flung as Holland, Borneo, Oman, Singapore, Nigeria, Malaysia, Qatar, Russia and the U.S., among others. In total, the Project Academy will deliver about 1,200 contact hours of education, both virtually and physically, the equivalent of two complete MBA programs. Twelve University of Texas professors are involved —including three from the Cockrell School of Engineering whose specific technical project management expertise has added invaluably to the endeavor. The rest are from McCombs.
