Employers often take a direct role in offering educational opportunities to employees, but the latest trend in learning is a far cry from the usual training and professional development programs.
Realizing it’s good for business and the community to have a motivated workforce with access to education benefits, high-profile organizations such as Starbucks, Taco Bell, and McDonald’s have begun offering innovative employee education programs.
In 2014, Starbucks and Arizona State University launched a program to help Starbucks employees earn a four-year degree online. If they work 20 hours or more per week, any of the company’s 135,000 domestic employees are eligible for the program. Workers with at least two years’ of credits would be fully reimbursed. Neophyte students (fewer or no credits) receive a 22 percent tuition discount from Arizona State until they reached the full-reimbursement level.
Most impressive is the fact that Starbucks employees, once they graduate, do not have to keep working at Starbucks, unlike most corporate tuition offers that require years of service in trade for college credits, usually graduate school.
Another innovative education offering, part of McDonald’s "Archways to Opportunity" program, allows eligible employees working in McDonald’s restaurants who are interested in earning an AdvancED/SACS/NCA accredited high school diploma and entry-level workforce certificates to have access to Career Online High School (COHS). COHS, developed by Smart Horizons Career Online Education in partnership with ed2go, part of Cengage Learning, is an accredited high school diploma and career certificate program.
Among other things, Archways to Opportunity helps employees learn English-language skills, earn a high school diploma and move on to an Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree.
Rob Lauber, Chief Learning Officer at McDonald’s, says the company believes that education is the true game-changer and is proud to provide tools and world-class training that help people succeed within the system.
"As part of our Archways to Opportunity program, we are pleased to be working with Career Online High School to make a high school diploma possible for our people—along with the opportunity to gain real-world career skills with older youth and adult workforce-focused curriculum," Lauber said.
"McDonald’s is improving lives through re-engaging older youth and adults back into the educational system," said Smart Horizons Career Online Education’s founder and Superintendent of Schools Dr. Howard Liebman.
"McDonald’s recognizes that investing in their people is all about enhancing work life for employees—by providing skills they need to grow and develop," added Ron Stefanski, executive director of Strategic Alliances at ed2go.
Smart Horizons and Cengage Learning also have partnered with several other organizations to offer COHS to employees and communities, such as Brown Mackie College, Kinexus, the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County, and other corporations, non-profits and public library systems.
Karissa Thacker, an organizational psychologist and advisor to UPS, Ford and AT&T, among other employers, notes that even if workers remain with their current employers, it will take more knowledge to work in entry level jobs in the next five years.
"Processes will become more automated and the people that are left will be knowledge workers," she said. "They will need better interpersonal skills and a higher degree of technological savvy."
Thacker says the business world is moving out of the Industrial Age, where workers were thought of as machines, either consciously or unconsciously, by many employers.
"The machine metaphor influenced HR decisions directly and indirectly," she said. "Within benefits and other workplace areas, you are going to see more attention paid to the whole person. We really understand that this is a new era, The Digital Era, and we are going to have to approach workers differently. These types of educational programs are a great example."
