For Your Organization

Custom Learning Solutions

Custom professional development designed around your organization’s goals, challenges, and people.

Custom Learning Starts With Understanding Your Organization

Every organization faces unique talent development challenges, timelines, and budget considerations.

That’s why Penn State offers three flexible learning options designed to deliver the right balance of speed, customization, and organizational impact.

Whether you are building foundational capabilities or driving enterprise-wide transformation, we will help you find the solution that best fits your needs.

Choose from three tiers of custom development targeting your learners’ specific needs, including:

Private Cohort
Modular Programs
Signature Custom Learning Solutions

Ideal Partners and Audience

Typical partners range from organizations seeking to build critical capabilities across teams or the entire enterprise to high-performing individuals and executive leadership teams seeking strategic alignment.

Delivery Alternatives

We meet you where you are: on-site, online, on campus at Penn State, or through a blended experience tailored to your operating environment. Our goal is to make your process simple and our learning accessible.

Program Length

From focused workshops to multi-month learning journeys, we work with you to understand ideal outcomes and what it will take to create real change for your team. Then, working together, we identify the timing and pacing to help you reach your goals.

Flexible Formats

Penn State's three-tier model offers multiple ways to accelerate development, from rapid deployment of proven content to fully customized experiences designed around your unique challenges. Each option is built to create measurable value while meeting your organization where it is today.

What Can a Custom Learning Partnership Help Your Organization Achieve?

We design custom corporate learning solutions around the priorities that matter to your organization. Together, we build capabilities that help your people put learning into practice and move important business priorities forward.

Develop Leaders Who Drive Results

Help leaders make sound decisions, communicate priorities clearly, and keep teams focused on what matters most.

Build a Strong Management Pipeline

Prepare emerging managers to take on greater responsibility with a clearer understanding of how to lead people effectively.

Align Teams Around Shared Priorities

Create greater alignment across teams, functions, and stakeholders to improve execution and accelerate results.

Build Organizational Resilience

Prepare leaders to adjust quickly, make sound decisions, and keep teams aligned when conditions shift.

Strengthen Supply Chain Leadership

Build leaders who can navigate disruption, manage complexity, and make strategic supply chain decisions with confidence. Equip unit leaders to balance risk, resilience, cost, and performance in today's rapidly changing environment.

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Choosing the Right Professional Partner

Organizations have more choices than ever when selecting a leadership development or executive programs partner. The best partnerships go beyond delivering content to helping organizations create lasting capability, change and organizational success.

A Learning Partner, Not Just a Program Provider

A Collaborative Approach

A custom program should not ask your organization to fit a fixed curriculum. The learning should fit your organization.

That’s why our process starts with collaboration. Your dedicated Relationship Manager will serve as a strategic learning and thinking partner, exploring your organization's goals, challenges, culture, and ideal outcomes before designing a learning experience tailored to your specific goals.

The result is a learning partnership designed around where your organization is going—and agile enough to evolve as your needs do.

Built for Application and Impact

Apply Learning Early

The value of professional development is not measured by what participants learn. It's measured by what they apply.

That is why Penn State custom programs emphasize practical application throughout the learning process. Participants engage with realistic business challenges, collaborate with peers, learn from experts, and practice applying new skills in situations that mirror the complexities they face at work.

The result is a learning experience that helps participants make better decisions and build stronger teams, with benefits that continue long after the program ends.

When Evaluating A Partner, Ask Yourself These Four Questions:

Does the partner take time to understand our business before recommending a solution?
Can learning be customized around our priorities, culture, and ways of working?
Will the same team remain engaged throughout the process?
How do they reinforce learning and support long-term impact after the program ends?

You shouldn’t have to fit your goals into a predetermined program. We start by understanding what you need to accomplish, then work with you to shape, deliver, and reinforce a learning experience around those goals.

What It’s Like to Work With Penn State Smeal

Every custom or tailored program follows the same six steps, from the first conversation through measurement after your team is back at work:

Explore: Understand the Business Challenge

We take time to understand your organization's goals, operating environment, culture, strategic priorities, and what success looks like.

Assess: Develop Organizational Fluency

Through stakeholder interviews, we identify strengths and enablers for change, and clarify what should look different for participants, teams, and the organization when the program concludes.

Design: Create the Learning Experience.

Your Penn State team develops a customized experience that combines research-backed insights, practical application, and relevant business context.

Deliver: Bring Learning to Life

Faculty and industry experts facilitate highly interactive experiences designed to engage participants and accelerate capability development.

Enhance: Support Learning Beyond the Classroom

We stay engaged after delivery to reinforce learning, assess impact, and help sustain momentum.

Evaluate: Understand Impact

We co-create an evaluation model with you, ensuring that we can use learnings to refine future programs or identify additional actions to support organizational success.

The Right Expertise for Your Organization

Custom learning succeeds with the right team. Penn State Executive & Professional Programs partners with you from strategy to delivery.

Relationship Manager: Primary contact

Faculty Director: Academic rigor & design

Faculty & Practitioners: Industry leadership

Let’s Solve Your Next Business Challenge

Tell us what you’re working toward. We’ll help you determine how a custom learning experience can support your goals.