Corporate Learning Factories – Benefits, Challenges, and Success Factors of Learning Factories in Industry

In today's fast-changing and volatile business environment, human capital has become a major economic asset to creating business value and gaining competitive advantage as a business. Human capital can be advanced through training and education. Training in learning factories has proven to be an effective approach for industrial learning, especially in the field of manufacturing. Some companies have recognized this and have developed learning factories for their businesses, in this paper also referred to as corporate learning factories. Employee training and personnel development are time-intensive and costly processes for companies. With the learning factory approach, expenses and training time can be reduced significantly. However, in literature, there is a lack of how to develop and especially implement learning factories in a corporate structure. Above that, studies regarding the benefits, challenges, and success factors of learning factories in industries are lacking. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the importance of learning factories in personnel development, provide an overview of existing learning factories in industry, and present results conducted from interviews with three companies on benefits, challenges as well as success factors of learning factories in industry.