Wal-Mart catches up with Kuru Lounge

Today:  Wal-Mart to Offer Its Workers a College Program

The purveyor of inexpensive jeans and lawnmowers is dipping its toe into the online-education waters, working with a Web-based university to offer its employees in the United States affordable college degrees.

The partnership with American Public University, a for-profit school with about 70,000 online students, will allow some Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees to earn credits in areas like retail management and logistics for performing their regular jobs.

…

“It came out of an awareness that the jobs in our stores are really good jobs,” Tom Mars, executive vice president and chief administrative officer of Wal-Mart U.S. said in an interview, “but if we want to make them great jobs, we really have to do something different to distinguish those jobs and our company from everyone else in retail.”

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He added: “We hope in this way to expand the education and employer communities’ knowledge of what works most effectively, so that policy makers, other companies and other stakeholders can continuously improve such offerings.”

Jul 2007:  The Open University

Second the ultimate customer for the project, will have to be heavily involved in the process. For example Boeing needs Aeronautical Engineers. To really get the type of engineer that they want they would need to lay out a set of skills that they feel are important. From there it would be necessary to backtrack to the courses which develop those skills, and a curriculum would need to be developed. From there textbooks would need to be written and labs developed. On and on continuing up the chain until a comprehensive program had been developed.

Wal-Mart, as is their want, has simplified the process a bit by finding a program that fits their needs rather than starting from the ground up but the underlying premise is the same.  It would be better if the cost was reduced a bit more, but that could be coming:  Wal-Mart has a tradition of driving costs down.

I anxiously await the various unions denouncement of the naked exploitation of the worker.

h/t: Memeorandum