Education and training play a critical role in improving business performance by equipping individuals with skills and knowledge required to be employed/promoted by an enterprise and also by assisting the enterprises themselves to develop (e.g. operate more strategically) or meet emerging challenges (e.g. understand how to leverage new technology). This requires services that are linked with and responsive to the changing business environment and the wide range of management and business capability needs of enterprises.
The Formal and Informal Learning Working Group has identified access, quality and relevance as the three most significant issues in the area of both formal and informal learning.
The issue of access includes a number of subsets:
Clear and concise information is of paramount importance to an enterprise in making decisions about accessing the right type of management capability training.
Quality is a significant issue. To encourage firms to make an investment in management capability training, there needs to be an assurance that the quality of training provided is of a high standard. The providers of capability development services must also be properly incentivised to provide high quality services.
This leads on to the final (and possibly most important) issue – relevance. It is critical that providers obtain vastly better information about local and regional skill needs and respond to them effectively. The partnership also notes that education providers need to not only reflect the “subject” needs of the business community in their learning offerings, but also provide learning in different contexts and appropriate delivery styles.