Business Report: Brushing Up

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Stacy Murphy, 34, multimedia director at ADM Productions Inc., a production and video company based in Port Washington, N.Y., is spending his Wednesday nights at school. He attends New York University's high-tech Center for Advanced Digital Applications in midtown Manhattan, where he is trying to create a swimming fish--a virtual fish, that is--for his final project. Even with a bachelor's degree in computer science and years of experience in graphics production and animation, Murphy still felt he needed to go back to college to further his career. And his company was more than willing to pay the bill of nearly $1,800 for the semester-long intermediate-level computer-animation class. "You have to keep abreast of what's new in the field," observes Murphy as he sits in a dimly lighted room with six other students, all in their 20s and 30s, who are toying with the Alias animation program. "It seems like every three months or so there is another version of a software package or a new chip to learn about."

John Klotsche, 56, is getting the same kind of tune-up. The chairman of Baker & McKenzie, an elite global law firm with 2,400 attorneys in 34 countries, Klotsche decided that the 550 partners in the firm, himself included, did not know enough about how to manage business in today's fast-changing marketplace. So the boss has headed to the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., to study business topics like strategic planning, delivering client value and implementing corporate change. Klotsche's firm is investing $4 million to $5 million for all the Baker & McKenzie attorneys to take two-week executive-education management courses at Northwestern. The program, which began in May, will take about three years to complete. "In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I would need to study something like this," says Klotsche, who has been practicing law for 31 years. "But you have to understand the dynamics of today's global marketplace in order to find and retain new clients."

From the boardroom to the back-office fulfillment department, all kinds of Americans are finding out exactly the same thing--and doing the same thing about it. More than ever before, professionals in many fields are feeling the need to obtain fast doses of additional training to keep up with intense competition and accelerating rates of change. Consequently, more and more of them are taking short-term, practical courses at business schools and continuing-education institutions across the country. The numbers are huge and growing: between 40 million and 45 million people are taking classes related to their careers. With rapid changes in technology and business management, some of these folks feel they need this education just to keep up. Most of the time, employers are paying for the classes.

The rush to quickie courses doesn't mean that M.B.A.s and other graduate degrees are going out of style. It's just that these are no longer the end of the educational road. The new courses are often supplements or complements to traditional education, maybe lasting just a few days, weeks or a semester or two, and often involve training in one specific area. This is much cheaper and less time consuming than going back to grad school or completing a second bachelor's degree.