Throughout the years UC Berkeley Executive Education’s Open Enrollment programs have not only served individuals, but they have also appealed to groups of people from the same company who attend the programs together. Whether they are colleagues from the same department who work directly together, or friends who work for the same company but do not work together daily, they have seen a greater impact for their organization by sharing the experience together.
Apurv Kamanth, a Certificate of Business Excellence alum, was recently interviewed about his experience participating in programs from Berkeley Executive Education. In his interview he shared how inviting one of his colleagues to a program with him enhanced the experience and increased the amount of value that he brought back to his company. "I brought one of my close colleagues with me, and we attended the class together. It provided such a broad and deep view of product management best practices that we have since sent all of our Product Management staff to the Program.”
Another past participant, Craig Fulton, shared his story:
Day-to-Day Impact
“In the past, I've taken a lot of training and sometimes I’d find myself going to these (programs) and saying ‘I just basically got a one week vacation from work.’ However, when I participated in the Berkeley Executive Education programs, I really felt like I saw myself incorporating things into my day to day. I've never found that in a training before. Our company continues to send multiple members of our team to Berkeley Executive Education programs because we continually see a high rate of return. We see people coming back and making changes. In turn, we sent more people through the programs.”
Taking Programs with Other Team Members
“We like to attend Berkeley Education Programs with other team members because it holds us accountable and then when we get back to the office, you find yourself looking at each other across the table and saying ‘Hey, we need to start leveraging some of the knowledge we've got.’ When you go by yourself, no one can call you out on that. When multiple people go, you can say things like ‘Hey, you just learned this, you should be able to answer this question.’ When I go with someone else, I know I have to really pay attention. When we go, we always get a hotel that's kind of far away, and we only walk. There and back. While we’re walking, we find ourselves talking about things, so we sort of force ourselves to have discussions about what we're going through in the classroom and how we can implement them back in the office.
There's been such promotion and evangelism through the company and hearing it from the CEO and hearing it from the CPO, ‘Hey, we went to Berkeley, we learned this!’ Now, people just want to go. They say ‘I want to be a part of that, I want to go.’ Now there's a waiting list of people in our company who want to attend one of the Berkeley Executive Education programs.”
Learn more about group enrollment.
