IF your friendly neighbourhood business school cannot provide the sort of management tuition your company is looking for, the answer is to create your own.

This is what Fujitsu Services, the European IT services arm of Fujitsu group, a leader in the worldwide provision of IT systems and services, is doing.

Normally a company sending a senior executive on a business school or diploma course has little choice. He or she must take the course as given.

However, using your own experts to develop the course yourself is an attractive alternative. With the added bonus of taking material from your own company for case studies, executives are likely to be happier with a home-grown course as well as being more productive when they return.

Fujitsu Services is one of the leading IT service companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It employs more than 21,000 people in over 20 countries in a £2.4 billion business headquartered in London.

Its UK business began with a partnership with ICL, the computer maker. Before the two companies merged, ICL was a strong technical business.

Ian Williams, head of organisation and people development, said: “Many of our managers are technical experts by behaviour, and in some cases will require people-management training to ensure they are more effective in their developing role.”

To equip them to play this expanded role, Fujitsu Services has launched what must be one of the most ambitious executive-development programmes undertaken in Europe.

The Fujitsu Management Academy involves 2,200 managers based in 13 countries who are taking part in a dedicated management-development programme delivered in 11 different languages.

With this purpose-designed scheme, Fujitsu has been able to employ its own expert consultants, devise its own syllabus and focus on turning its technically oriented people into rounded people managers.

Paula Graham, the Fujitsu Management Academy programme manager, said: “Good people managers will enable us to become more effective as a business, and we expect the programme will grow and adapt with changing business priorities.”

One of the specialists recruited for the programme was DIEU, the Danish leadership institution, which has called on the resources of over 350 development professionals.

Jeremy Hill, the UK head of DIEU, said: “Taking more than 2,000 managers through the programme in their own language across most of Europe was a huge logistical exercise that required impeccable organisation and took the programme beyond a traditional business school method or solution.”

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