Aviation Week & Space Technology
08/20/2007, page 93
Printed headline: Putting Heads To Work
Harnessing intellectual energy to solve problems is the goal of the Boeing Co.’s global operations, and this year’s Workforce Study finds Boeing among the best at capturing and developing that capacity.
By sheer mass, the company claims some best-in-class points:
•$100 million invested in education each year.
•12% of the company’s 158,000 employees are pursuing an academic degree.
•6 million hr. of training are performed every year across the company (not based on a specific goal per employee).
•3,000 people are involved in some form of training every day.
But the point isn’t the metrics. What’s important is that employees are able to “maintain their currency” through education, says Richard Stephens, senior vice president of human resources and administration. College tuition reimbursement is a major part of the plan, as are technical and program-management skill-training.
Another focus for Boeing is leadership training. “We’ve shifted our focus away from the business schools,” says Stephens. “Today, we rely much more on Leaders Teaching Leaders, our internal course. Chairman and CEO James McNerney and his staff lead the course, sharing how they individually got to where they are, what they learned along the way.”
The Boeing Leadership Center continues to develop courses in support of technology, teaming, leadership and program management. Based in St. Louis, it represents a significant campus in its own right.
The company also revised its approach to new-graduate hiring. “We are focusing on those colleges and universities that offer great curricula, including the historically black colleges and universities—that means every university does not meet our criteria,” Stephens says.
Using a system that resembles its approach to supply-chain management and selection, Boeing has streamlined its list of qualified graduate and undergraduate schools from just about every U.S. institution to a list of 150 that are transforming course offerings to fit the new technologies and models of the aerospace/defense industry and, specifically, Boeing. The effort to narrow this list continues. It’s particularly important as Boeing evaluates the impact of its $100-million annual investment in tuition reimbursement.
Today, Boeing has 2 million applicants for approximately 10,000 job openings. “We attract them with the number of career opportunities we can offer across the company, the cool work we do,” Stephens says.
He advises applicants to shift their thinking. “We want people who have the education to tell us what they want to do, what problems they want to solve—not what they want to be.”
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