Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 26)

markets. We’re extremely successful — and hope to be even more successful — in Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea. With the experience that I had across the world, it seemed like a natural ﬁt for someone who had an afﬁnity for learning.” At present, GM University contains 16 relatively independent colleges, each of which relates to a function within the company, such as ﬁnance, engineering, human resources and leadership. “I bring the colleges together in a team of learning and performance managers who support all of the colleges to use common, global systems and processes. So the way the learning is created, distributed and presented to learners is similar across the colleges,” she said. “But each of the colleges develops their action plans and budgets and presents those to me, and I approve or disapprove. That’s all amalgamated into the GM University space.” Content-wise, GM University is predominantly virtual, she added. “It’s a virtual university. It is a virtual connection of learning and development activities that is global in nature. The colleges offer training and knowledge support for all of the major functions of General Motors. GM University e-learning can be accessed anywhere, anytime when someone has a PC and an Internet connection. That’s kind of my philosophy around learning: It must be available, it must be in the necessary languages and media, if possible, and it must be approachable for all generations and cultures.” A small staff runs the technical aspects of the university, as well as the leadership college, at GM’s corporate headquarters in Detroit. Much of the GMU team is overseas, which means Alexander travels out of the country about every other month. “I have part of my team in Europe, and I’ve visited them twice this year,” she said. “I taught in India this year and spent over a week there. I spent more than a week in Shanghai, China, and I was also in Korea and Russia this year.” When Alexander is in the ofﬁce, she keeps a busy schedule. She gets in her car at about 6 a.m. every day and usually checks voicemails or joins a conference call on the way to work. She also receives about 150 e-mails per day. Part of this heavy workload stems from the fact that she takes a personal interest in GM’s population of young employees. http://www.knowledgeadvisors.com http://www.knowledgeadvisors.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

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