Brushing Up

By Laura Koss-Feder

Stacy Murphy, 34, multimedia director at ADM Productions Inc., a production and video company based in Port Washington, N.Y., is spending his Wednesday nights at school. He attends New York University's high-tech Center for Advanced Digital Applications in midtown Manhattan, where he is trying to create a swimming fish--a virtual fish, that is--for his final project. Even with a bachelor's degree in computer science and years of experience in graphics production and animation, Murphy still felt he needed to go back to college to further his career. And his company was more than willing to pay the bill of nearly $1,800 for the semester-long intermediate-level computer-animation class. "You have to keep abreast of what's new in the field," observes Murphy as he sits in a dimly lighted room with six other students, all in their 20s and 30s, who are toying with the Alias animation program. "It seems like every three months or so there is another version of a software package or a new chip to learn about."

John Klotsche, 56, is getting the same kind of tune-up. The chairman of Baker & McKenzie, an elite global law firm with 2,400 attorneys in 34 countries, Klotsche decided that the 550 partners in the firm, himself included, did not know enough about how to manage business in today's fast-changing marketplace. So the boss has headed to the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., to study business topics like strategic planning, delivering client value and implementing corporate change. Klotsche's firm is investing $4 million to $5 million for all the Baker & McKenzie attorneys to take two-week executive-education management courses at Northwestern. The program, which began in May, will take about three years to complete. "In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I would need to study something like this," says Klotsche, who has been practicing law for 31 years. "But you have to understand the dynamics of today's global marketplace in order to find and retain new clients."

From the boardroom to the back-office fulfillment department, all kinds of Americans are finding out exactly the same thing--and doing the same thing about it. More than ever before, professionals in many fields are feeling the need to obtain fast doses of additional training to keep up with intense competition and accelerating rates of change. Consequently, more and more of them are taking short-term, practical courses at business schools and continuing-education institutions across the country. The numbers are huge and growing: between 40 million and 45 million people are taking classes related to their careers. With rapid changes in technology and business management, some of these folks feel they need this education just to keep up. Most of the time, employers are paying for the classes.

The rush to quickie courses doesn't mean that M.B.A.s and other graduate degrees are going out of style. It's just that these are no longer the end of the educational road. The new courses are often supplements or complements to traditional education, maybe lasting just a few days, weeks or a semester or two, and often involve training in one specific area. This is much cheaper and less time consuming than going back to grad school or completing a second bachelor's degree.

An increasing number of companies are customizing courses for their employees in conjunction with major universities. The former Coopers & Lybrand in the newly named PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, has offered three-day and five-day executive-education programs for its partners for about four years at both Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration and the Harvard Business School. "Companies want their employees to learn something new and specific that they couldn't do before," says Marie Eiter, director of executive education at Tuck. The school has been providing three programs a year for the former Coopers & Lybrand, with 40 professionals taking part in each three-day program.

Whatever the motivations, many of the new wave of professional students are taking on subjects, mostly in information technology and business management, that didn't even exist two or three years ago. The innovative topics include Internet marketing, electronic-commerce marketing, multimedia and design, computer-network management, global-marketplace strategies, client service and retention, and managing a business in the face of new competitors. "Some of the courses we offer are so specific and narrowly focused that they would not really be applicable toward a degree," says Richard Vigilante, director of the Information Technologies Institute, part of New York University's School of Continuing Education and Professional Studies. Enrollment at the institute goes up about 12% every year. Noncredit courses throughout the continuing-ed school range in cost from $400 to $5,000.

Leo Campbell, 50, manager of electronic commerce with the U.S. Postal Service in Washington, readily saw the need for a quick update in his field. He took a one-week, $5,000 course in managing technology and strategic innovation at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. "What I learned keeps me and my group at the Postal Service on the cutting edge of technology and customer innovation," Campbell says. "Who would have thought a few years ago that people like me would be sitting in a class swapping Internet war stories?"

It's not only people working for big outfits who are enrolling either. Self-employed decorative artist Jill Saddic, 29, of New York City recently completed a one-semester course in multimedia and design at N.Y.U.'s continuing-ed school. The certificate she received will help springboard her further into computer graphic arts. "I didn't really have any kind of computer background, but I felt that I needed a really specialized course to advance myself," says Saddic, who has a bachelor's degree in illustration. "Going back to school for another full-fledged degree just would not have been practical."

In particular, certificate programs, which issue documents of completion and sometimes an accreditation to students who have completed a specified course of study, are growing in enrollment by about 20% annually, says Jules LaPidus, president of the Washington-based Council of Graduate Schools, which represents 430 institutions. At Stanford's business school alone, the number of participants in its executive-education program is up almost 50% since 1991, according to program director Gale Bitter. The Kellogg school is expanding at a similar blistering pace. It had 44 executive-education courses with 2,700 participants in fiscal 1994; the number has jumped to 62 courses with 5,000 participants in 1998.

For those professionals in high-tech companies and accounting firms, as well as specialists in business management and international business, such quick-hit, targeted courses are crucial, LaPidus notes. But even doctors, artists and opera singers are going back to school for executive-education and high-tech courses.

Robin Hoffman, 32, a dance notator who records choreography for the Paul Taylor Dance Company in New York City, knows the importance of timing. The former ballet dancer paid $3,400 in February to take a one-semester course at N.Y.U. in multimedia technique. She needed it to keep up in her field, since computers are slowly replacing graph paper and pencil for dance notation. "I couldn't even imagine five or six years ago taking a course like this," Hoffman says. "But this way I could learn a lot in a short period of time while still keeping my job."

Having an advanced degree, of course, is no bar to updating your skills. Take the case of Eva Wisnik, 35, a New York City career strategist and executive recruiter, who found that a special one-week $875 program in Fairfax, Va., on administering a career-assessment test was more valuable to her than her M.B.A., which cost $20,000 and took four years to complete on a part-time basis. "I have earned at least $45,000 from administering this test to about 900 people over the past few years," she reports. "This is far more than any actual earnings that my M.B.A. has brought me."

While most students are taking executive-education and continuing-education classes on university campuses, a growing number are studying far away from any grove of academe. Some are learning from videotapes, while others watch satellite lectures. But these methods of distribution are rapidly being overtaken by distance learning via the World Wide Web. Armed with a personal computer, a moderately fast modem, an Internet service provider and a Web browser, students can quickly gain access to all kinds of course material whenever they want. There are about 1,200 degree and certificate distance-learning programs available from about 900 accredited colleges, observes Karen Hansen, executive editor at Peterson's, a Princeton, N.J., education- and career- products publishing company that puts out the annual Peterson's Guide to Distance Learning Programs. Peterson's latest figures show that U.S. higher-education institutions offer distance-learning courses to more than 7 million students, according to spokeswoman Sue Brooks.

"The fastest-growing part of distance learning is in continuing or executive education," says Brandon Hall, author of Web-Based Training Cookbook (John Wiley & Sons; $39.99), published last year. "Busy professionals trying to manage their work and personal lives can log on to a class late at night or early in the morning, or whenever is best for their schedule. And they're learning only what they really need to know to improve performance on their current job or maybe in preparation for that next job."

Could distance learning ever replace traditional classroom education? You don't have to wait for the next century to answer this; you have to wait only until the fall. Western Governors University, a completely virtual college based in both Salt Lake City, Utah, and Denver, will be offering its first courses. Started by Governors from 18 Western states and encompassing the state universities in those areas, W.G.U. will initially offer continuing-education courses and associate degrees, says Jeff Edwards, marketing director for the school. There will be a con- centration on information technology courses, although at press time the catalog was still under development. Courses will be offered via the Web and satellite TV. Students from all over the world will be able to enroll in programs, which will cost anywhere from $300 to $700 each. The goal is to gather course material from universities and companies across the country. "With time constraints and family responsibilities, this kind of university can offer an easier solution," says Edwards.

In some cases, distance learning and customized courses are being combined. N.Y.U. and IBM in November 1996 announced a partnership to provide information-systems courses over a global computer network to both IBM and non-IBM professionals worldwide, says Information Technologies' Vigilante. Twelve classes have already been offered, and 18 more will be available by the year 2000. By the end of this year, more than 640 professionals will probably have taken online courses in this program. N.Y.U. is discussing similar online course formats with other companies.

Nor is the trend likely to fade away soon. "There is ongoing pressure to submit the best work and move right on to the next assignment," notes the Postal Service's Campbell. "These quick, focused classes help you live up to this challenge." Syllabus, anyone?