On 25 December 2014, the Open University of China (OUC) and Beijing Automotive Industrial Company (BAIC) signed a cooperative agreement to join hands in establishing the BAIC Learning Centre of the OUC Beijing Experimental School.

The cooperation of setting up the BAIC Learning Centre of the OUC Beijing Experimental School was designed to capitalize on the OUC’s “Assistance Plan for Training and Developing New Industrial Workers” (hereinafter referred to as “Assistance Plan”) as a way to integrate excellent vocational educational resources into the automotive industry, to facilitate the transformation and upgrading of enterprises, and to help employees grow and develop through the combination of the two. Through this cooperative arrangement, the OUC also hopes to carry out both degree and non-degree continuing education programmes for front-line industrial workers, while at the same time working through the credit bank system to explore models and mechanisms for “Replacement of Courses” and “Convergence of Two Certificates” programmes in an effort to construct an “overpass” to lifelong learning for employees in these fields.

The BAIC Learning Centre of the OUC Beijing Experimental School will officially begin its enrollment in the spring of 2015. The two parties plan to cooperate with each other in such aspects as training models, mobile learning, open courses, credit bank, and practical teaching base construction. It will follow the “Assistance Plan” in order to explore new methods of developing creative talent training to better serve the needs of enterprises and employees, while at the same time continuing to enhance teaching and educational quality so as to train a large number of high-quality skilled industrial workers needed on the production line at BAIC.

BAIC’s predecessor, BAW (Beijing Automobile Works), was a large state-owned enterprise under the Beijing municipal government, with more than 110,000 on-the-job workers. BAIC ranked among the top 300 of Fortune 500 firms. The cooperative project between the OUC and BAIC will be operated by Beijing Automotive Education Investment Co. Ltd. under the BAIC. As a special training agency of BAIC, Beijing Automotive Education Investment Co. Ltd. undertakes the task of education and training for mid-level and senior leaders and front-line blue-collar industrial workers.

                                                                                           By Xu Gang  Shao Jianhong