Building Organizational Competitive Advantages with Strategically Aligned Technical Degrees: Dividends from a Visionary Corporate-University Partnership

In 1999, the technical leadership from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and General Motors Corporation (GM) with a vision for creating strategic competitive competences through distance learning education technologies partnered to develop and implement technical master´s degrees with a defined output: Graduates with unique skills to add value with automotive technology applications. In less than ten years, these degrees produced 153 graduates who applied the technical knowledge learned to realize over $30M in documented first year cost savings, six major quality process implementations and one pending patent. This result translated into a 500% return on employee development through tuition investment. This article chronicles this success story and how it can be duplicated in other corporations with the same degree of success. Learn more about this partnership, the implementation and execution of the Quality Standards that strengthened the commitment to maintaining the degrees, and the keys to replicate its implementation in other organizations.