Question

Explain why continuing education for professionals is important to both organizational and individual success. What kinds of program options would you provide for professionals—such as accountants and dietitians—who need professional certification?

Answer 1

Continuing education determines how updated an employee is while working in an Organization. More updated an employee is, more the efficiency of such an Employee at work, especially when such an employee introduce relevant changes or come up with suggestions that could be beneficial to the Organization in the long-run or for its current survival in the industry. Hence continuing education for Professionals in order to be more fruitful to the Organization as well as to boost the personal and professional growth aspect of an employee, is important for Organizational and Individual success.

In this regard, the education could basically be provided to the employees in the form of Formal training programs that could be organized with the primary motive of retaining the talented workforce of the Organization that the Management must have tapped with lots of efforts and fortune. The training programs could be designed in such a way that it is mainly rewarding for the employees. Once they see the benefits of this program for their personal growth and career development, they shall be more interested in committing themselves to such a program. Next, the training program so designed must not be boring and dry. If such is the case, there shall be high possibility of the employees losing their interest in the program soon and thereby defying the motive of conducting the program itself. Further, in spite of effective designing of the training programs, what is more essential is the activity to spread awareness about the same. The employees should be in the position to comprehend the objective of this career program even before they enroll themselves to it. Various ways of educating the employees about the benefits of the programs and the highlights of the contents of the program, needs to be reached out to the employees in an effective manner. Once they attend the program, efforts need to be channelized more towards offering them vocational training that could advance their career development and empower them as well. Such programs are therefore necessary to be designed because it could highly motivate the talented employees and let them consider staying put to the Organization by showing more loyalty and dedication towards the same.

Based on the above characteristics, the staffing process could be so designed that when the manpower requirement is estimated, career training and education programs for development should be kept on mind such that the staff process is open to hire the employees even if they lack certain skills that would be required to be possessed by them if they would like to move up in the Organizational hierarchy. The work load analysis could be more flexible such that the staffing includes even such candidates for recruitment process who may currently not be having the skills to perform various jobs at one given point of time but may have the potential to develop the same. In terms of recruitment, career programs can influence their ability to recruit employees such that it looks into the bigger picture of what kind of employee skills sets would be required to meet the long-term goals of the Organization by hiring them and once such training programs are in place, the recruitment could be matched with the purpose of the training programs and if in line with the expectations of the of the training programs, then that could influence the ability to recruit employees.

In this regard, career training and education programs need to be customized across the generations in order to make the programs more relevant to them thereby enabling more connection to the concept. Accordingly, the younger generation could be offered programs that give them relatively more opportunities to explore something new or to assume more challenging responsibilities because they are high on spirits and have comparatively lesser obligations otherwise that could impede their career growth. On the other side, the older generations could be motivated by obtaining the flexibility in terms of monetary incentives and advancement. Training may at times not interest the worker owing to the time involved into cultivating the intended potentialities in themselves. On the other side, they would love to try something which is interesting and engaging in nature, thereby helping them strike a work-life balance. Also, some innovative programs could be introduced in the Organization such as reverse mentoring which would require the older employees to learn something new from the younger ones, say, like using of technology to ease the job profile tasks, etc. In such a way, assuming the new roles would be learning for both the parties. Also, in line to this, career programs could also be designed that has a diversified team of older blending with the younger generation thereby helping each other with their own area of expertise.

Following are certain types of Education and Training Program options that could be employed at a particular firm for the employees:

• Varied retention program across different generations working at different levels in the Organization
• Non-monetary linked programs that are challenging for the younger generation and interesting for the older ones
• Computer-related programs to educate the older generation
• Online Accounting programs
• Even physical therapy and personal fitness programs
• Personal Investment techniques Programs