Friday, January 23, 2009

Workplace Learning

While workplace learning is often thought of as initial training and nothing more, it is much more important than that. Training can often affect the customers you attract and keep. Training Trends and Tips says that it is important to help the customers rather than try to sell to them. Still initial job training is one of the most important aspects. Training trends says
Organisations of less than 250 people spend on average around £417 per head on training, whereas organisations of over 10,000 employees spend just £73 per head.
Thats almost 6 times as much per person in the smaller organizations!

Blended learning also is an emerging trend, such as this class. It can involve a variety of methods, such as f2f, internet, and others. Most organizations seem to show that people learning through blended learning method are retaining more information than through just one method.

One common thought is the need to continue training America's work force. Foreign language being one main area of concentration. Its becoming more common for people to be able to speak other languages in the country as well as with international clients. Also technological training being another front runner in importance. Very few jobs don't require some sort of computer interaction whether it be from teachers using blackboard, to network managers who's job revolves around technology. All of this is important as a large amount of American's are in unskilled jobs with little ability to increase their standing in society. While we need these jobs too, we are currently in a large surplus of them and lacking in skilled employees in certain regions such as medical.

Another problem with training American's is the shortage of money in the current economic situation. The government is lacking the budget to start training programs, although it is trying to do so in the stimulus package. Companies themselves are also lacking the finances to properly train and keep up with training that is required to be up-to-date.

2 comments:

  1. I was very surprised about the information pertaining to training in small organizations as oppose to larger ones. Do you believe this is due to management in smaller organizations having closer ties with its employees?

    Also, I agree that either directly or indirectly, the economic stimulus package may assist corporations in employee training. However, I think that instead of issuing "tax refunds" of a few hundred dollars per household we should take that money, pump it back into small businesses, and rebuild our economy from the ground up. The reason that I believe this is because with the last tax refund many citizens used the money to pay off debt rather than spending it and actually stimulating the economy.

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