Increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of continuing training measures through cooperation between continuing training companies and SMEs

Scientific Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, , language: English, abstract: One of a company's competitive advantages is its organizational ability to use strategically important competencies for its own innovation and value creation processes. In this way it improves its competitiveness.

Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do not use this opportunity for more growth.
The companies surveyed clearly indicated that they usually have no local conditions and resources of their own to develop competence development strategies and to follow them up on transfer success and measure them for success in further training.
The structures and processes for personnel development and thus the internal services for changes and innovations in the operative processes are hardly developed in these companies.
The assessment of success by the training companies commissioned with the implementation of qualification and development measures is limited to the learning field.
In order to ensure knowledge transfer, however, it would be necessary to extend further training controlling to the fields of activity of the participants. After all, it is not only a question of whether the participant has acquired a learning success, but whether he is in a position to implement the learning success.

Benefit-oriented evaluations, i.e. evaluations of the success of qualification measures from the economic perspective hardly play a role in practice.
The low equity ratio in SMEs hampers investment in professional skills development. Last but not least, there is a lack of marketable services to support innovation processes in SMEs.
How can the development of skills for innovation processes in SMEs be promoted by innovative continuing training companies and how can the success of continuing vocational training be measured and evaluated for the company, its employees and the participants?
A strategic field of action for continuing training companies is the systematic development of tailor-made services to support learning in dialogue with SMEs. Their wishes and needs are the starting point and the benefit, the goal of the development process in which they are integrated as customers by the training companies. The concept of "Innovation and Value Creation Partnership" (IWP) is a model for systematic service development in continuing training companies.