Ways businesses and governments can advance employee education
We live in an amazing time when every year new gadgets appear and, what’s more important, working conditions are changing quickly and drastically due to new technologies and artificial intelligence. This process means a serious challenge to businesses as they, in need of professionals with new skills, have either to hire new employees or retrain and upskill the ones they have. Blogger Mike Black from custom thesis writing service points, ‘The problem is that many universities, colleges, and community colleges can’t adjust their curricula to the changing world quickly enough’. So, new employees, college or university graduates, also might not have the required knowledge and skills. Businesses, governments, educational institutions, non-profits, and even ordinary people should take certain actions to face this challenge.
Ways of Advancing Employee Education
It’s clear that retraining and upskilling the employees are profitable for companies as training boosts employees’ performance and thus increases the profit. Besides, the possibility to get upskilling or retraining at a company is a benefit that makes such a company more competitive in the market. So, what are the ways of advancing employee education?
- Upskilling is training when employees learn new practices and the ways of using new tools. Such training can be done through lectures, short training videos, and different types of courses. The courses can be held at the working place or community colleges. Using innovative automation, artificial intelligence and robotics improve productivity and in many cases replace humans. And then people need to get retraining to acquire new qualifications.
- Retraining (or reskilling) is training when employees are taught an entirely new profession. Governments should support this strategy, as it’s the way to fight unemployment. But it can be also good for companies as it might be cheaper to retrain existing employees than to hire the new ones and spending money on their recruiting and getting adapted. Besides, there is no guarantee that those new employees will have the skills the company needs. Retraining usually takes a longer time than upskilling and usually includes classroom studying and on-the-job practice.
Governments and Employee Education
Governments should also support upskilling and retraining because such programs reduce unemployment and so boost economic development. Why are governments’ helping necessary? Many little businesses just don’t have money to invest in their employees’ training. Governments can provide tax exemption for businesses that support their employees’ upskilling and retraining. One more way was done in Singapore. There the Skill Future Credit from the government is given to all citizens who are over 25 years old to get some kind of education. Governments can start their own training programs or become coordinators between educational institutions and businesses.
Some Ideas to Make Retraining and Upskilling Better
- For better results, it’s necessary to have the retraining or upskilling course, held at an educational institution, correlated with businesses that sent their employees to take that course. A business very often needs some very specific skills, so, an educational institution should address this need.
- It’s important to involve more low-skilled workers in retraining and upskilling. Companies often prefer not to invest money into the professional education of low-skilled workers. But governments to secure social issues can stimulate businesses to invest in retaining and upskilling their employees by providing tax exemptions. Non-profits can also be involved in this process of professional training of low-skilled workers.
- To stimulate employees to study all their professional life long many companies offer their workers grants for education. Employees, having their knowledge and skills regularly updated, will make more profit, so such grants are a very good investment.
- With technologies developing so quickly nowadays, the education of a person can’t be finished before he/she starts his/her career. So, nowadays they start discussing creating new types of educational institutions such as subscription or experiential universities. A subscription university will allow its students to quit and in a while continue their education during all their lives. Experiential universities are the ones that combine theory with a lot of practice.
- A good idea is to use apprenticeships to train middle-skilled workers like lab technicians and even computer programmers. Apprenticeships usually combine theoretical and practical education for professions like plumbers, but this practice can be very effective for people having a couple of years of college and some practical experience.
Businesses, governments as well as employees should make efforts to fit the demands of modern technologies advanced to them. The challenge is serious, but a solution needs to be found.
