Curriculum and Certification

EEA Announces Curriculum and Certification Program at Expo and Conference, June 3-4

A new curriculum and certification program for the emerging field of Enterprise Engagement has been announced by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance.

The development of the curriculum and certification program will be directed by an Advisory Board of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance composed of management in all areas and levels of private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Claire Howells, Vice President of Engagement for Zions Bancorp, and Don Peppers, Partner, Peppers & Rogers Group, will serve as co-chairs of the Executive Advisory Board. The curriculum and certification initiative is being developed by the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, a coalition of organizations committed to improving financial results on an ongoing basis by fostering the sustained engagement of customers, channel partners, sales and nonsales employees, and vendors.

The goals of the curriculum and certification are to provide individuals and organizations the skills and framework essential to profiting from engagement over time. “The return-on-investment of Enterprise Engagement is based on understanding the inter-relationship of engagement across all audiences—customers, channel partners, sales and nonsales, and vendors,” says Allan Schweyer, EEA Chairman. The curriculum and certification program is designed to address the need for today’s executives and managers to understand engagement both in terms of their personal leadership skills and their ability to integrate the elements critical to engagement: leadership, training, multi-platform communications, technology, rewards and recognition, incentive programs and more.

“Engagement encompasses a variety of specific tactics that get the best results when aligned across the organization, whether in the private, public, or not-for-profit sectors,” notes Schweyer. “Our objective with the curriculum is to provide individuals and consultants with a practical, research-based framework they can utilize to understand the broader issues of engagement within organizations and how they inter-connect, and to enable them to leverage other educational programs in all areas of engagement to deepen their expertise in relevant areas and demonstrate their competence.”

The corporate certifications are designed to provide organizations with a framework they can use to objectively evaluate their current practices, implement more effective practices and measure the results. “Certification will provide organizations with a system of benchmarks they can use to implement and profit from an engagement strategy in a measurable way,” says Don Peppers, Co-chair of the Executive Advisory Board that will contribute to the development of the curriculum and criteria. “Potentially, requirements for this certification process can be met in part by successful participation in certification programs in other areas of engagement. We plan to design the curriculum and certification process so that engagement and consulting companies can use it to help train and benchmark their clients, and through their work help continually improve it.”

Eventual applications for the certification could include the creation of a stock index and fund based on companies with audited engagement practices, since the shares of publicly held companies with highly rated engagement practices appear to outperform the general stock indices over time.

“There is extensive research on the link between engagement and financial results,” explains Clair Howells, Executive Advisory Board Co-chair. “Now the goal is to give organizations the tools to make it happen, and that includes both people and processes. This initiative is designed to provide a usable, practical framework that managers and consultants at all levels can apply to help further their organizations and their own careers.”

The curriculum and certification initiative will seek to mine a brain trust of people in all areas of engagement at every step of the development process. “Our goal is to have up to 12 groups collaborating through social networking, polling and other technologies contributing to a state-of-the-art curriculum and process for profiting from engagement,” says Schweyer. “All of the research indicates that managers are at the front-line of engagement, and that all sectors of the economy need managers who know how to engage at every level. We hope by involving them we will create a tool ideally suited to their needs that can continually be kept up to date.”

Chief editors of the curriculum will be Don Peppers, Allan Schweyer, Rodger Stotz, Chief Research Officer for the Incentive Research Foundation, and Bruce Bolger, Managing Director of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance, along with a team of writers, editors and curriculum designers with extensive experience in all areas of engagement and curriculum design.

For information, contact Bruce Bolger at info@enterpriseengagement.org or 914-591-7600, ext. 230.