News From the Auto Industry

“There’s a desire to take budgets and costs down, yet there’s also a much higher expectation of how quickly people need to learn new things,” says Donnee Ramelli, president of General Motors University. With people’s free time dwindling as companies get leaner, he adds, e-learning is a good way to build skills without spending a lot of money.

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.”

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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.”