A 2019 InStride/Bain & Co. survey revealed that 80 percent of employees said they were interested in going to school while working, but only 40 percent knew their employer offered a tuition assistance program (TAP).

Education is a significant stepping stone to greater earning potential — and a key factor in driving better retention, performance, customer satisfaction, innovation, and other business objectives.

However, only 2 percent of workers who have access to a TAP actually use it, despite the fact that U.S.-based companies spend $28 billion on them every year. In addition, organizations often subscribe to libraries of videos or short courses to educate and upskill employees, but these avenues do not offer any meaningful credentials and are often unused and ineffective at delivering any business outcomes.

But, there’s an entirely new approach that makes it possible to go beyond traditional learning and equip your people with the skills and education they really need to further their careers and improve your company’s bottom line — strategic enterprise education.

Strategic enterprise education is a customized approach to identify a company’s specific strategic challenges, assess skills gaps across the organization, and design a comprehensive program that equips employees with relevant education opportunities through partnership with top-quality institutions that are committed to serving working adult learners. Most importantly, it equips organizations with a proven strategy to support employees every step of the way — from discovery to enrollment and all the way to graduation.

With Strategic Enterprise Education, higher learning is seen as a strategic investment in the company’s future, not as another administrative cost center like medical benefits or a 401(k). This point of view creates new expectations for delivering the program and holding it accountable to drive business results.

A successful Strategic enterprise education program starts with effective planning. InStride starts with a workshop to bring together key leadership across the business to align on overall business objectives and explore the organization’s current workforce, available skills sets, and needs for upskilling to see what the program should focus on. Then, building from a foundation of more than 300 online degree and certificate programs from our curated network of top-tier research universities and education partners around the world, InStride helps the organization identify the programs that will best meet employees’ needs and equip them with the skills the organization needs most.

Designing a strategic enterprise education program is the first step, but if your organization wants to reap the benefits of an upskilled or reskilled workforce, employees have to be aware the program exists and it has to be easy for them to enroll. If you build it they will come — but only if they know about the program, understand its benefits, and feel equipped to take advantage of it.

InStride works with clients to design the right strategic enterprise education program, deploy the platform, and drive engagement and success. From a client-branded website powered by InStride, interested applicants can:

That just leaves performance and accountability. Like anything else you invest in, Strategic Enterprise Education™ programs need to be monitored and benchmarked. InStride provides reporting and analytics to track progress against your business KPIs — so you can ensure you’re getting return on your investment.

Additionally, when you partner with top-tier research universities, you gain access to the university’s faculty, tech centers and research labs, which are tremendous opportunities to bring even more leading edge innovation into your business.

By starting with your people and giving them the tools they need to get the education they want, you can help your employees reach their career goals while also helping accelerate your enterprise’s success.

To learn more about implementing a strategic enterprise education program in your organization and upskilling your people, contact us. Stay up to date on the latest InStride insights by following us on Twitter, Linkedin or Instagram.