Child Care Education Community Blog

We are in the middle of a transforming global environment, one that is fiercely competitive and where the future success of our children will depend on individual talent and merit. To be competitive in this new world, it is critical that we develop our children to be proficient in the areas of their personal talent. 

It is well known that factors such as communication, stimulation, nurturing, nutrition, and experiences play a key role on optimal brain development for young children.  Knowledge and skills in these areas must be learned and applied consistently by primary care givers and child care professionals.

While child care businesses were originally founded to serve the basic ‘nanny’ needs of working parents, the responsibilities of a child care center and child care professionals have gradually increased and now require a higher level of training to serve these needs.  This evolution has occurred over time and is due to many studies confirming the critical impact of quality child care on the development of children and their ultimate success as adults.

From a practical stand point, child care centers face the dilemma of balancing tuition with salaries and continued professional development.  To save costs, many centers opt for basic on-the-job training and development by Center Directors.  This is similar to an experienced executive officer at a hospital being required to train hospital staff in patient care (if the law allowed for this to happen). 

This common practice at child care centers places a tremendous burden on Directors who are not expert trainers and whose primary role is one of operations management.  It requires Directors to be constantly enrolled in courses, current in best practices, and to have the ability to quickly and effectively transfer this knowledge to employees while assessing the application of their knowledge and skills in the classroom.
 
It is important for child care centers to assess and focus on their core competencies and to use available software services to increase the quality the center provides to parents.  In some functional areas, centers do this well; an example is the use of software tools to manage tuition, record keeping, and to ensure security.   Staff development is even more critical and should receive similar attention through the use of expert software services to deploy training.

If our children are to remain competitive globally, we must continue to invest in the development of our young population.
This means focus must be placed on both academic as well as interpersonal skills including the ability to understand different perspectives.  As the first point
of  contact (along with parents), it is important for child care professionals to role model these skills and be able to communicate well with all stakeholders: children, parents, and administration.   

Some states mandate this type of training.  Regulatory requirements for training of child care professionals differ considerably from state to state and from country to country.  Some states do not have mandated minimum requirements for training, and others require anywhere from 8 to 40 hours of pre-service training annually.  Recently, many states have proposed legislation to address this.  For example, three states in the USA passed legislation to increase compensation to child care providers with more education and training.  At least four states enacted legislation that involved training requirements for child care providers. The State of Florida requires 40 hours of introductory child care training within 15 months of employment.

Many state legislators are now proposing mandatory training of at least 40 hours with the objective of  ‘professionalizing’ child care givers and centers.  In the State of Texas, there is a recent proposal for 40 hours of required training. This proposal is preceded by a statement comparing training for hairdressers who require 1500 hours of training to only 8 hours of pre-service training required for child care givers.

Motivate your staff to ensure quality of service. For child care businesses to be successful they must build a loyal and committed workforce.  This requires an investment in the development of professional skills so they can remain competitive and can look forward to growth (in their current center or a different one).  This type of investment promotes openness, mutual trust, and respect between staff and management and ultimately influences parents who can sense this energy at the center.

Read this news article from MSNBC:  Recession squeezes day care from both sides

How has the recent economic downturn affected your organization? What impact has it had on you, and how are you dealing with it?

“An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once then he’s in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.”

— Charles Kettering                   

We all know there is a recession, and there are many companies that seem to be failing.  The media continues to feed the fear of continued economic downturn.  There are no successes, or none that come to light through the media.  Most people are waiting and watching with a sense of doom and apathy, and yet there are some that are filled with hope and are actively seeking opportunities.  We see this in small examples, such as a professional in the IT industry that I met last month who was anticipating being laid off and had already formed a home health care company with the intent of working with his wife who is a nurse. 

Every business, every manager, every professional has the opportunity to choose between apathy and creativity.  Apathy will bring with it inertia: no energy, no creativity, no one initiating change, dependent on the same approaches and processes year after year.  For these, there will be eventual change, but it will come from the outside, with executives making decisions to cut budgets or from clients choosing to go elsewhere, drawn by positive energy, interest, and pleasant service.

Here is one example:  Recently, two medium sized companies in the U.S. took a hatchet to their training budgets and laid off every one in their education department.  This decision is not entirely the fault of the executives; it is also a result of apathy in the leadership within the targeted department.  It requires creative thinking by the leaders in every department to demonstrate to executives how they can increase efficiencies and decrease costs significantly through the use of different business models; it requires looking outside the bubble to find new and readily available solutions to meet their needs; and it requires speed of action as well as regular communication with the executives. It requires becoming part of the solution. It requires becoming part of the solution.

It is about people and their development:

Success in these times will be measured by an organization’s ability to achieve its goals with apathy being their number one enemy.  People are tremendously important during these times; their skills along with their attitudes can make or break a company.  Some organizations are cutting costs carefully while ensuring the key training elements that provide energy and core knowledge for their employees and clients remain intact while cutting peripheral training.  Many are moving from traditional classroom training to a hybrid of online and live training.

With the number of innovative strategies such as the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, this is a creative time for training organizations to revamp their traditional approach, regardless of whether they use classroom or online training.  This will allow them to significantly reduce costs and still meet their organization’s people development needs. 

The education and training market will never revert to traditional ways of doing things.   Change is here to stay.  Organizations will have to adapt and begin using technology and innovative business models more aggressively.

After cutting their training budgets, many organizations are using informal and on-the-job training.  This can be extremely costly in the long run.  We have heard recently of a company that had to pay a $2.5 million fine to the U.S. government because one of its front line employees did not know the importance of shredding private information, dumping it in the trash can instead.   This type of consistent regulatory compliance knowledge cannot be transferred informally.  Interactivity and assessments are required to assure management that knowledge is consistently transmitted and is being actively used.

Remember, training is a service.  This service is provided to employees and customers to increase performance, productivity, and loyalty – all of which drive revenue.  Lead your organization to achieve these objectives efficiently, while reducing unnecessary costs.  Find the right approaches, tools, and technology for your organization.  Approaches that provide tremendous value to your organization and help you achieve maximum benefit.

All businesses today need leaders in every role and position, not just in management positions.  It takes initiative and individual drive to make a business work in today’s environment.  It is what attracts customers, a differentiator in these highly competitive times.  Empowered Training’s newsletter this month is a call to managers and professionals to wake up, to take the bull by the horns and play an active role as a leader within their organization.

This month we are launching a blog as part of our monthly newsletter allowing you the opportunity to communicate with us. You may find yourself nodding in agreement when reading an article, or you may disagree with something, or you may even wish to share a situation or circumstance relevant to the topic. Now you can link to our blog and share your thoughts! We look forward to hearing from you.