Holly Franklin

The pressure to upskill faster than the market moves is real, and it's not letting up. AI integration, skills obsolescence, hard-to-fill roles, and a workforce that expects learning to connect to actual career mobility: L&D leaders are being asked to solve complex organizational problems with limited time, tighter budgets, and an expectation of measurable ROI. Most organizations try to solve this alone. That's both expensive and unnecessary. 

This masterclass makes the case for a fundamentally different approach: treating university partners not as vendors of off-the-shelf content, but as strategic talent development partners capable of co-designing learning that maps directly to your organization's real skills gaps, cultural context, and long-term workforce goals. And in a learning landscape saturated with content, academic credentials still matter. They signal quality to employees, demonstrate organizational investment, and create career pathways that generic training simply doesn't.

This session uses Northeastern University's B2B partnership model as a live case study in how organizations can enter, scale, and sustain high-impact university partnerships without betting the whole budget on an untested solution. The key is a stackable, tiered investment strategy that allows companies to start small, demonstrate value quickly, and build toward more customized, integrated programs over time.

You'll explore how leading organizations have built high-impact university partnerships that accelerated talent development, linked learning to performance outcomes, and transformed L&D from a cost center into a strategic business function. Their results illustrate what's possible when organizations commit to a co-designed, credentials-based approach to workforce learning.

Whether you're exploring your first external learning partnership or looking to move beyond transactional tuition benefit programs toward something more strategic, this session will give you the language, the framework, and the confidence to take the next step.

You'll leave with:

• A clear framework for evaluating and structuring university learning partnerships

• A tiered engagement model you can use to enter with minimal financial risk

• Real-world examples of what works, and what makes organizations ready to scale

• Strategies for scaling personalized learning across your workforce without sacrificing quality or relevance