Apple’s internal training program, the secretive Apple University, is the subject of a new profile in The New York Times. Three Apple employees who took classes in Apple University spoke to the Times about the program, which is run year-round and features a faculty that includes professors from many prominent universities.
In 2008, Steve Jobs selected former Yale School of Management dean Joel Podolny to run the program, and he still remains in that position. Employees who enroll in the program can sign up for courses that match their positions — one class specifically concentrated on teaching founders of newly acquired companies “how to smoothly blend resources and talents into Apple.”
As one might expect, simplicity in design seems to be a common theme in classes at Apple University.
One class highlighted Pablo Picasso’s The Bull, a series of lithographs that starts with a highly detailed bull, and ends with a very basic figure that still represents a bull. “You go through more iterations until you can simply deliver your message in a very concise way, and that is true to the Apple brand and everything we do,” an employee said.
