Conexant, UCI School Team for Staff Classes

Forming the first of what it hopes will be a series of lucrative business partnerships, UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management has created an educational program tailored to serve executives at Conexant Systems Inc.

The Newport Beach semiconductor maker, in turn, will give the graduate school about $1 million a year for the course, as well as for information-technology research projects and a specialized laboratory course in the electronic business field.

The company also will establish an extensive internship program for UC Irvine business students.

Already, 28 Conexant employees, described as senior managers and “fast-track” workers, are enrolled in the tailor-made executive development course, the first for UC Irvine.

Conexant is directly involved in developing the program. UC Irvine professors wrote the core curriculum, and Conexant supplemented it with examples from its corporate experience. About 25 to 30 employees will be enrolled each quarter and will attend a total of 12 daylong sessions over three months. They will receive certificates upon completion.

The multiyear partnership is one UC Irvine would like to expand to other companies. Similar agreements with other firms are already under development, said David Blake, dean of the graduate school.

“It’s important for us to link our educational and research missions closely to that of the business world,” Blake said. “Business is changing so rapidly that we need to learn from our business colleagues and they need to learn from us.”

For Conexant, the plan combines a means to meet the company’s specific training needs with the broader perspective of an academic approach.

“First and foremost, they are experts at teaching and we are not,” said Ashwin Rangan, chief information officer at Conexant.

The faculty has more exposure to an array of business knowledge, Rangan said. “They get to interact with other sectors of the economy that we do not.”

In addition to Conexant’s financial commitment to pay for the special classes, the university also benefits from it’s sponsorship of a laboratory course in information technology that will focus on e-businesses. The class will bear Conexant’s name in its title.

The arrangement also expands an internship commitment. Con-exant has brought on a few students each summer but now will take up to two dozen student interns at a time. This summer, 15 interns will work at Conexant and can continue part-time when the school year begins again in the fall.

In the midst of an extremely tight job market, Conexant’s intention is to lure the students back as full-time employees once they finish business school.

Conexant also said it would fund one or two major research projects each year and will sponsor a teaching prize in the MBA program.

Blake said the partnership is the most extensive relationship that the graduate school has developed with any single corporation.

UC Irvine’s school of engineering received $20 million last year from Broadcom Corp.’s co-founder, Henry Samueli, and named the school after him.

On Monday, the chairmen of Broadcom and Conexant will announce a joint gift, expected to be $5 million to $10 million, to the engineering school for the formation of a new program called the Center for Pervasive Communications.