Building a masters-like program with in-house experts

Property group Mirvac is building a postgraduate-style learning program to refine the skills of the professionals who manage its portfolio of assets, design and build them, and who manage its finances.

The Mirvac Masters program – which includes three streams with set curricula – is designed to be “the best on-the-job university for property professionals”, Mirvac director of talent and organisational development Karen Maher told HRD.

“There’s a lot you learn when you are actually in a job, and you need to know how to apply that,” Maher said. “People learn what they can at university but once you get into a business and start applying that learning day in, day out you may find there are gaps.”

Learning program taps internal expertise

Online learning sessions via Teams bring together groups of workers from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. For some streams, such as the program for assistant development managers, class work is subsequently applied during property visits.

“Bringing those people together across the states has been invaluable – they’ve built their own cohort,” she said.

The Mirvac Masters program is in its pilot phase, Maher said, with feedback from managers and assessment by the worker-students used to refine material in the curriculum.

Maher will be speaking with her colleague Chantelle Mansour, the learning and organisational development manager at Mirvac, at HRD’s Learning and Development Summit 2024 in Sydney on 30 October.

Capability assessment is key

Course material is designed within Mirvac, with experts occasionally brought in to cover areas such as soft skills that are not particular to property but important to business. “When it comes to property experts, we’ll use our own people,” she said.

The program was inspired by the company’s lunch-and-learn sessions, where an in-house expert speaks for 20 minutes, followed by a 25-minute question session. “We were soon having 300 people dialling into these sessions,” she said. “There was always something that people wanted to learn more about.

“That’s when we realised: we’ve got amazing people, so why don’t we run a whole program with our people?”

Learning & Development Summit 2024

At the HRD Learning and Development Summit 2024 on 30 October, Maher and Mansour will deliver the case study: “Leading with ambition – accelerating capability development with Mirvac Masters”. They will talk about how Mirvac is designing, implementing and evaluating its new Mirvac Masters program to engage their employees with a whole new learning experience.  

•  Developing a post-grad masters-like learning experience to provide deep technical learning opportunities 

• Working with multiple stakeholders to curate and facilitate the program, including executive leaders and managers   

• Evaluating the engagement and impact of the program through metrics, surveys and team feedback  

• Key lessons learned in rolling out a new company-wide learning program  

Register for HRD’s Learning and Development Summit 2024 here.