(Why organizations are approaching learning all wrong!)
Let’s
offer thousands of courses about education activities and don’t care so much about
the impact. Is’t it a great job?
Nowadays we speak about further education or adult
education, especially to make our workplace better, to improve key competences
of our employees and etc. But are these activities made in the right way? Maybe
not, for example in Europe there are many companies, which support foreign
language lessons for their workers, they pay lot’ s of money for these classes
and mostly they don’t care about their impact. For example I have taught many
courses or private lessons with these workers who had the “great opportunity”
to take part in these courses. But they were not sometimes motivated enough,
they tried to speak about their private life in their native language,
sometimes they were offering to give me their signatures even when we have not
meet each other. I think that ca. 70% of
them didn’t learn a lot. Was it just my mistake or am I bad teacher? No, I was
doing my best. I tried to make our lessons as much individual as I could have
done. But they just weren’t motivated enough. That means that all this
companies skipped first step, especially to explain to their workers, how good
this opportunity is, how much money can they save, why it can be crucial for
their promotion.
It’s just a business, even for language schools because they
can offer many courses with slowly impact. They offer companies “great prices”
and that is how the business comes to the world. It’s the same example as for
ski school, they teach children every day new steps and they make it so slowly.
Their parents are happy because their offspring can show them every day
something new and the parents pay again for next lesson. But we should know
that they could learn it faster, but why when it is such a good business. The
same applies to language schools, they make sometimes easy test to show off how
good results their customers have. But in the fact, it is sometimes really sad,
they are not able to solve every day’s tasks in foreign language.
Let’s think about it, if you want to be good manager and
also use your budget in the most effective way then you have to check many things.
Talk with your employees in which further education are they really interested,
take your time to think how you can use their new skills for your company and
don’t be selfish. And for sure you have to established control elements (they
should be objective), which can show you if you use your money in the best way.
