Consortia Programs
Traditional university offerings are provided within three distinct categories of public programs, consortia programs, and custom programs. As you move from public to consortia to custom, the organizational specificity increases. Kelley Executive Partners has chosen not to participate in the open enrollment market, but rather focus on consortia and custom programming. The fundamental basis of our strategy is the development of educational partnerships that move from a classic client-vendor relationship to a deep partner engagement.
A large portion of our business is in consortia and multi-organization partnerships. In 1988, Kelley Executive Partners (KEP) launched its first consortium. This consortium, the Indiana Partnership for Management Development was developed from KEP’s strategy of innovation through market intelligence and in an effort to shift the focus of executive education away from the traditional university model of “build it and they will come.”
Since that time, KEP has built and delivered numerous consortia, each with a unique theme, approach, and learning objectives, ranging from global leadership to general management to leading change.
We see the consortia product line as a pull mechanism that showcases our partnership process and builds delivery credibility with a small set of “world class” organizations. There are several unique features to our concept of a partnership. First, and foremost, we stress the involvement of all the companies in the designs and delivery of the program, and in the selection of participants to the program. The point being that most university executive programs are designed with a rather vague notion of who the audience is. We start with the audience as defined by the executive specialists of the companies involved in the partnership. That is why it is critical to have equal involvement of all the companies in the program development and delivery process.
Secondly, we combine the strengths of the open enrollment experience with the strengths of a custom designed program. Given the types of companies that currently comprise our consortium programs, participants gain the advantage of mixing with their peers from some of the leading firms in the world today. At the same time, they have a program, which is designed with their specific companies in mind; complete with presentations by faculty who have researched and spent time with their firms, panel discussion by senior executives from their companies, an advisory direction from the HRD executives representing their companies' development needs.
