I love thinking about ways to help others out and to advance the ideas and practices that we have in motion today. This is also my first post on Steemit, and I hope to post many more. I would love to hear every criticism and thought you all may have when reading this article. We are all here together, and if everyone tried their hardest to advance humanity and love it a little more, we would thrive! So, here is one partial idea I have regarding our Educational Institutes and how they can better prepare learners for their future careers.
Vision:
Teach Educational Institutes how to create the most job-specific training available while motivating, or incentivizing, learners to stay dedicated to their studies with job opportunities.
Introduction:
Places of Employment attempt to hire knowledgable and experienced employees, yet the pool of applicants these Places of Employment are hiring from is filled with ex-employees from other Places of Employment, or graduates from high schools and universities. Hence, most Places of Employment cannot be certain that any of their applicants have been provided adequate training from their past experiences. Outside of a cover letter, resume, or application, no Place of Employment can guarantee that the individuals they hire will possess any amount of job-specific competency.
How Can Places of Employment Increase Their Chances of Hiring A Great Employee?
Ideally, all Places of Employment would offer internship programs to individuals who recently graduated high school, or to anyone who is looking to start a career. These internship programs would benefit all individuals looking to start a career, as they would gain the knowledge and experience needed to succeed within a Place of Employment. Places of Employment would also benefit from this ubiquitous internship program, as they would be educating their future employees with the exact knowledge they wanted them to possess while also gaining cost-effective employees.
Though this would be ideal, I believe many desire to have a college experience. I also believe that many Places of Employment may not possess the resources or ability to effectively teach and train a new pool of applicants year after year. Because of this, I believe that Educational Institutions, such as Universities, can alter their course offerings to mirror the ubiquitous internship program that I stated above. The following is quite similar to the inter-workings of a Technical Institute, but I believe this model can be applied across all Educational Institutions and should not be limited to specific careers.
Process:
Educational Institutions will form a temporary or ongoing relationship with organizations seeking knowledgeable employees.
A list of job-specific skills needed by those organizations will be created -- this list should contain every task that would be performed by the future employee -- exact tasks, processes, etc. Within the organization, the job-specific list can be built a number of different ways:
- The hiring managers can prepare a list of skills they find appropriate and acceptable.
- Employees within the position being hired for can list their job responsibilities, prioritizing them by the skills used most often.
In turn, Educational Institutions will create training based on this list that they have received -- this training will represent an internship. Ideally, the classes and trainings would revolve around the resolution of a job-specific task or problem.
- The new classes and trainings prepare learners for careers, as opposed to diplomas or certifications.
- The new classes and trainings come as close to an in-person internship as possible, but everything is performed within the Educational Institution or online.
- The new classes and trainings can lead to learners being hired by the respective organizations that the Educational Institutions built a relationship with.
Learners will begin and conclude training:
- Upon completion of the entire class, the learner will be required to undergo assessments to verify their ability to perform job-specific tasks that they would be required to perform at the place of employment.
- This assessment will be created by the hiring company and should resemble projects and tasks specifically performed by those who do, or will, possess the position being hired for.
Learners who successfully complete the assessment will move to the interviewing stage. At this stage, Places of Employment can be relatively confident that the applicants would be competent within their future role.
How would this help?
First and foremost, it provides learners with job-specific knowledge and experience. Regardless if they gain a job from the training, they gain the knowledge and experience that they would gain if they were actually working, or interning, at an organization. Currently, learners are taught how to pass a certification or gain a diploma, but that certification, or diploma, only tells the learner what the school or vendor wanted them to know. It doesn’t necessarily tell them what companies want them to know. This training would provide them with the exact knowledge and skills needed by actual organizations — this would shift the standard of learning from the Educational Institutes to the Places of Employment.
Motivation: With actual careers on the line, this would heavily impact the amount of time and dedication we see in the lives of learners. We would be completely altering the lives of learners, as they can acquire a new job from the work they put in. In turn, we would see a rise in the number of learners enrolled at Educational Institutes, as well as a rise in the number of minutes spent studying and attending class.
Competition: Learners would now be competing for a career as opposed to a Grade Point Average.
Revolutionize the teaching/training industry. Again, this would be setting a new standard. Education would no longer be focused on what it takes to obtain a diploma or degree. Education would be focused on exactly what learners need to succeed in the real-world.
This would also benefit organizations around the world, as they would be rewarded with knowledgeable, experienced employees. Thus, the products and services that these organizations could offer to the world would be far superior when compared to the products and services offered by organizations with under-performing employees.