News From the Auto Industry

A senior Finance Ministry official, interviewed by Reuters said that GM had made a final offer for Daewoo that excluded its largest and most antiquated plant of Pupyong, which employs almost half the Korean firm’s workforce and is highly sensitive politically.

The payoffs of e-learning, beyond a more competitive workforce, are savings in travel costs and harder-to-quantify employee time. Plus, Ramelli adds, “at the end of the day, we have people with naturally better e-skills because this is the way they’ve been learning and working.”

gm.com

GM created General Motors University in 1997 to tackle continuing education; it administers 1,300 courses for the company’s 88,000 managers and professionals. A growing number are taught via satellite video broadcasts and Web-based e-learning. This spring GM inked a deal with online educator UNext, through which GM staffers can take classes at UNext’s innovative Internet business school, Cardean University, even earning e-MBAs.

“We have very deep engineering talent here, so I can always pick up the phone and get technical help,” Ronchi says. “We have guys who shoot bullets with bullets. I think they can help us solve some of our portal problems.”

Like GM, Raytheon gets courses from outside vendors and develops its own. “If it’s something that doesn’t exist, or that’s proprietary to us, we’ll make it,” says Don Ronchi, head of the Raytheon Learning Institute. Raytheon partners with e-learning providers Skillsoft and FirstClass for management topics. But to teach specific engineering topics or how to use the company’s SAP financial software, Raytheon builds its own courses.

“There are no disagreements when it comes to GM acquiring the Kunsan and Changwon plants,” the newspaper said. “It was learned that the price tag is slightly less than one trillion won,” the newspaper reported. This figure represents about $781.8 million. “GM has made a new request for the government to guarantee as much as $400 million in Daewoo Motor’s debt,” it added.

All class enrollments at GMU—about 70,000 a year—are done online. It’s the same at Raytheon, which offers more than 350 classes through the Internet. Employees can take online self-tests that help determine what they know in a given subject—and where their gaps are. The software guides them to appropriate courses and lets them devise learning plans and register for classes.