.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} Since Drake University’s Center for Professional Development set out to work more closely with the Greater Des Moines community five years ago, the center has developed certificate programs with three major businesses, is facilitating a medical research project and will host a major conference on health care this fall.

Much of this progress began when the center moved into the College of Business and Public Administration about four years ago, giving it the faculty and resources needed to develop more programs outside its undergraduate and graduate degrees.

“Because we’re in the same building, we have a closer relationship with our faculty, so that’s given us extra energy and capacity to work with extra businesses,” said Lance Noe, the center’s director.

The center has been especially successful in developing training programs for the private sector; Principal Financial Group Inc., Hubbell Realty Co. and Meredith Corp. all have participated in certificate programs through Drake. The Business in Leadership certificate program, initially developed with Principal and now tailored to Hubbell, has been especially effective in training mid- to upper-level management. Each class is centered on a new topic, ranging from finance to marketing and human resources, which is designed to make participants begin thinking more strategically about the entire company rather than just their department or area of expertise.

Companies “want something that can give them powerful tools in a six-month time frame,” said Danette Kenne, director of Drake’s Center for Graduate and Professional Studies, “and where they can get these groups of people who are at an upper level, that are managing the business units, together as a group and targeting their needs in their organization to take it to the next level and to do that in a way with faculty.”

The center provides hands-on training, with its professors designing the curriculum and teaching the courses. “We think our strength is offering a more academic setting for professional development that can be customized to a firm,” Noe said.

Center officials meet with company executives for about six months before the program, discussing what business issues professors are researching and how they might apply to their company, as well as specific goals they hope to achieve from the training. The programs are designed to handle about 30 students, who meet two or three times a month for about six months.

“It’s a very involved process,” said Thomas Root, an associate professor of finance who helped design the Principal program. However, Noe said, “it is one that’s paid dividends. We’ve done a second run with Principal and hope to do another cohort of students” next year.

It also is a major investment for companies, with each student costing the equivalent of two or three classes for a master’s degree in business administration.

“I think for companies that see themselves as trying to move on to the next step and make some fairly big substantial change, they’re reaching to find some kind of common high-level learning opportunity that can help them take their next step,” Noe said.

Gary Walljasper, assistant vice president of organizational development at Principal, came up with the idea for a well-rounded training program that used both theory and application to train the company’s future leaders, said Jim DeVries, senior vice president of human resources. It has put about 25 participants through the Leadership in Business program in each of the past two years.

“This is more a program for the seasoned managers and leaders,” DeVries said. “We do a lot of work to educate them beyond their functional level of expertise.”

DeVries also notices that, “it really improves their networking. They have a chance to interact with peers, to interact with senior managers and come out with a relationship that they didn’t know existed before the program.”

Hubbell took the structure of Principal’s certificate program and tweaked it to fit its goals. Twenty-four people in departments such as retail, marketing, legal and construction started the nine-month training in September.

“Our company has so many diverse operations,” said Hubbell President and CEO Rick Tollakson. “It was a way to bring them all together over this next year and focus on very specific business components.” Tollakson said this could be a program his company will offer every two or three years.

Meredith’s Marketing Certificate program was slightly different from the other programs because it focused more on training one department in a specific area. Once a week for about three months last summer, half of the consumer marketing department went through basic marketing training.

“The purpose of the program was to really make sure everyone in the department was starting from the same level of expertise in a general marketing background,” said David Ball, vice president of the division.

Because the training required so much out-of-work time, he doesn’t know if Meredith will offer it again. To show the program’s impact, Ball said, people worked in groups during the training to look at some of the department’s magazines that were more challenging to market and come up with new ideas. Now “we’re implementing the ideas,” he said. “It took a lot of time, but it really made a difference for our marketing.”

Noe of Drake points out that the discussions in these private-sector certificate programs tend to be more sophisticated and dynamic than those in a typical M.B.A. course, because everyone goes through the course together and applies issues to one company.

It also helps Drake professors take what they are researching and see firsthand how it applies to an actual company.

“Our faculty are connected (to the graduate and certificate programs),” Kenne said, “so they’re getting that real-world exposure. To have that opportunity as a faculty member to be doing research in an area and then have a group of 25 or 30 executives talking about how this fits both strategically and operationally in an organization … and get that feedback and come back sometimes that same evening and walk into an M.B.A. class and talk about that topic – it’s just very dynamic.”

Five to 10 percent of those who completed a certificate program have decided to go on to get an M.B.A. or other graduate degree, Noe said, with credits from the certificate program counting toward their degree requirements. Drake’s College of Business has about 550 graduate students this year, compared with 475 five years ago.

Certificate programs with the private sector are in addition to the several other services the Center for Professional Studies offers, including consulting and certificate programs for the nonprofit and public sectors.

On the public administration side, associate professor Allen Zagoren has been active in helping facilitate a study for the Iowa Medical Society, which is reviewing the state of health care from the organization’s perspective. The project started last spring, and Drake’s role has been to suggest topics, take information from panels and synthesize it, and eventually help publish the findings in a report that will be presented at the society’s annual meeting next spring.

The center will also host its second annual Innovation in Leadership Conference on Nov. 16, which this year will focus on “Healthcare and Iowa’s Future.”

This approach, Noe said, “gives us another way to reach out to the professional community, and then when they’re here, they see the professional development and graduate school opportunities. It just helps us reach out and try to be a more integral part of the community.”