Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Corporate Academy

Updated on December 1, 2025

A mainstay of enterprise learning, the corporate academy, is getting a glow up in the age of AI. Once seen as a way to easily disseminate learning to a company’s workforce, the academy has returned as a collaborative, interactive way to build skills and close the skills gap.

Whether you’re preparing to build a corporate academy, or you just want to know what all the buzz is about, this guide will tell you everything you need to know about the new corporate academy, and how to get started with one.

What is a Corporate Academy?

A corporate academy — also called a learning academy, training academy, or skills academy — is a specialized training and development program designed by an organization to enhance the skills and knowledge of its employees, partners and customers. Ideally, academies offer a range of learning opportunities in various areas such as leadership development, technical skills, compliance training, and any other necessary skills — all of which align with the company’s business goals and values.

The academy can be based online, involve a combination of online and in-person instruction, or even be a physical campus. In fact, early corporate academies were physical sites.

The History of Corporate Universities

GE claims the first corporate academy, which was founded in the 1950s as a physical campus in upstate New York and is still operational today.

While such corporate academies were useful, they were expensive. Only the wealthiest companies could afford to build their own campuses or send their managers away for weeks to train. Like so many things, that changed when the Internet became available.

The dawn of online learning brought with it the online academy, which made it possible for businesses of all sizes to create their own corporate schools. However it was a rocky road; online academies have fallen in and out of favor over the past two decades. Early online learning could be buggy, slow, and wasn’t always engaging. Some of the earliest online learning was simply a digitized version of in-person courses; videos of recorded lectures and paper handouts scanned in and turned into PDFs.

Online learning has come a long way since the early ‘00s. Today, learning modules include practice, feedback, gamification, and so many other elements that learners need to feel engaged. However, now academies are changing once again. AI is supercharging corporate learning.

How AI is Changing Corporate Academies

Josh Bersin has written that AI is revolutionizing corporate learning. Generative AI makes creating content at scale faster and easier for overworked L&D teams, helps drive adaptive learning in corporate training, and allows teams to create learning tools that go beyond the course library.

Bersin is particularly excited about the creativity AI might unleash in instructional designers, just as the dawn of online learning inspired creative ideas:

“…all this is about to change. AI, the technology of the decade, is perfectly suited for what we need to do. AI helps companies build content quickly, it produces creative new content at scale, and it gives users a personalized, dynamic experience to learn. And I’m not just hyping an idea: I’ve seen what AI can do and the results are staggering in many ways.”

There are several ways AI can change corporate learning:

• Content Creation: Manual content creation takes time and resources, which means that sometimes a module is needed for months before it’s actually produced. Generative AI allows teams to create content quickly and at scale, rolling out new corporate learning fast. What might have previously taken months or weeks might now take days.
• Personalized Learning Paths: AI’s ability to digest and analyze data is likely going to change the way learners consume courses and modules. AI can analyze a learner’s progress and recommend specific training to expand a skillset or fill a skill gap.
• Improved Searches: Most learning academies have years’ worth of content in their systems. Some of that content is outdated, but many modules have information that may be useful for learners. However, those resources may be buried… in old courses, handouts, or posts. Looking for them manually could take hours. However, AI can find those learning materials quickly, summarizing the most relevant and useful information available.
• New Learning Tools: Learning need not be limited to traditional courses or learning modules. By using AI to create tools like chatbots, L&D teams can add to their corporate academies’ learning arsenal. For example, a chatbot can help a learner answer a specific question, like “how do I complete this task?”, either by generating text, or by linking to a tutorial. This makes learning in the flow of work quick and easy for learners, who may have only a few seconds to consume training.

The Differences Between Corporate Academies and Corporate Training

As organizations continue to rethink how learning shows up across the employee lifecycle, it’s important to distinguish between traditional corporate training and the more holistic corporate academy model. While both aim to build skills and support employee development, their structure, purpose, and impact look very different.

Where corporate training has long played a valuable role in equipping employees with the skills needed to perform specific tasks, it often operates in silos—focused on immediate needs rather than long-term growth. Corporate academies take a different approach. They’re intentionally designed to support broader organizational goals, driving capability-building at scale and embedding learning into the culture itself. Where corporate training is often reactive or task-based, academies are proactive, strategic, and continuous—developed to evolve with the business, not just support it.

This shift from tactical to transformational is what makes corporate academies such a powerful tool. By integrating cross-functional expertise, leveraging AI-driven personalization, and aligning directly with business priorities, academies help organizations not only upskill but future-skill. And that’s where their impact truly begins to take shape.

Can the Corporate Academy Close the Skills Gap?

The skills gap has been a big problem for employers in recent years. The World Economic Forum predicts that more than half of the world’s workers will need to be reskilled by 2030. The skill gap is considered to be the biggest barrier to business transformation; 85% of employers are making upskilling their employees a priority, according to the WEF.

The top skills that businesses are looking for are cognitive ones, such as analytical thinking and resilience, as well as leadership and creativity. However, when you think of a typical training program, the skills that are delivered are often less cognitive and more concrete: compliance, for example, or hard skills related to work.

Corporate academies are designed to align the greater needs and goals of the organization with the training being offered, and they are able to do this at scale. Academies are also able to provide the training needed to train future leaders in the organization.

How to Build a Corporate Training Academy

For many L&D departments, the idea of setting up an academy can be overwhelming. However, L&D shouldn’t be on their own when it comes to this initiative. Corporate academies are intended to align with the goals of the organization, so leadership should be deeply involved in this process.

Here are the five steps your business can take to begin building a corporate academy:

1. Set Goals

Know what you are trying to achieve. Work with stakeholders in the C-suite and throughout the organization to determine what your organization needs out of your academy. Are you trying to reskill your team? Teach cognitive skills? Develop leadership? Understand what you need as an organization.

2. Identify Who Your Learners Are

Many corporate academies are internal, but you may need to train people outside of your organization. Your extended enterprise can also benefit from a learning academy. Take the example of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which created an eLearning academy for customers, specifically.

3. Develop a Curriculum

Using your goals, develop a curriculum that’s able to deliver the learning your enterprise needs to achieve its goals. This doesn’t mean you have to create all the content yourself;  when construction supplier SouthernCarlson createdSouthernCarlson Academy, the company used both bespoke and off-the-shelf content that met their needs. Since then, the company regularly releases new courses using course creation tools included in the Litmos LMS.

4. Choose a Platform

Look for a platform that gives you the flexibility you need to deliver important content. You should be able to easily create your own content, but also choose from a library of pre-made courses. Collaboration tools are also key, as is the ability to offer both live training and self-paced options.

5. Determine Your Corporate Academy’s AI Needs

What makes the most sense for your organization? It’s tempting to jump in and try everything at once, but by choosing the best use case for AI, your team can focus on how you want to improve your academy. Maybe you want to create more courses more quickly. Or perhaps you want to personalize learning. Choose the use of AI that’s most important to your organization — the rest can come later.

6. Measure and Refine Your Content

Your content library should never be stagnant; as your learners and enterprise grow, your content should grow and change. You’ll also see room for improvement when you measure the learning outcomes. Commit to revisiting your content regularly.

Embracing the Corporate Academy

Learning & Development leaders have had a lot on their plates lately, especially since the pandemic has disrupted in-person workplace norms and has put online learning at the forefront of corporate culture building discussions. If you’re in L&D, you may be taking on many responsibilities, from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs to leadership development initiatives, to closing the skills gap within your company’s workforce. An academy can centralize these projects and make your job more manageable, while aligning the goals of the greater organization with the learning being offered.

The new era of corporate academies is here, offering organizations a powerful tool to bridge the skills gap and empower their workforce. With the adoption of digital learning and AI powered corporate academies, companies can unlock the full potential of their employees through convenient, flexible, and personalized learning experiences.

If you’re ready to take your corporate academy to the next level, schedule a free demo of Litmos LMS. Experience firsthand how this robust learning management system can streamline your training initiatives, enhance employee engagement, and drive business growth.