“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.
January 31, 2010
The need for us to come together to help promote child education and development in West Africa has long been due. Child Aid West Africa was founded in 2008 by a group of Africans, residing and studying in the Netherlands and the United States of America.
The low literacy levels inWest Africa are determined both by problems in
the formal school system, and by the lack of learning opportunities outside
this system. We examine these factors the reasons why books are kept
closed in chapter 1.
Firstly, not enough children are in school: there are 14 million children of
primary-school age out of school in the 11West African countries for which
data is available, more than half of them girls. They are also
disproportionately poor and in rural areas: this inequity in access needs to
be addressed. The quality of education is also poor: the disastrous lack of
trained teachers and literacy facilitators is a key factor in this.
40 million adult women in West Africa cannot read or write.
Tackling the challenge effectively also requires recognition of who the nonliterate
people inWest Africa are: they are more likely to be women and
more likely to be poor. Often, they live in rural areas; nomadic populations
who are a significant proportion of the population in West Africa, but are
often not reached by formal education are particularly vulnerable to
illiteracy.7 Strategies to improve education levels and standards and to
raise adult literacy levels must be designed to reach out to these excluded
groups.
14 million children are out of primary school in West Africa.
Nearly 8 million of them are girls.
Moreover, drop-out rates are high: in Benin, Niger, Senegal and Burkina
Faso, for example, fewer than 1 in 4 children who start primary school
actually complete it;10 generally, the figures are lower for girls.
West Africa is missing more than 750,000 trained primary
school teachers.
Those teachers who are in place have to manage large classes with limited
training, few or no materials, and poor pay. Efforts to increase the number
of teachers inWest African countries have often been at the expense of
training and conditions of service.
The aims and objectives of this organization shall be as follows:
Goals and Objectives
To provide financial assistance for educational purposes, for children in conflict affected West African states, Liberia/Sierra Leone/Ivory Coast/Guinea
To develop system for identifying children of primary and secondary school age that are limited to accessing education due to, lack of transportation ,lack of financial resources, or lack of commitment from parental guardians.
To sensitize the impoverished communities on the importance of participating in ‘’Free Education” where available, and to do so with the support of community leaders, as well as direct approach of parents and guardians awareness programs.
To raise funds through various fund raising activities, outside West Africa.
To create a net work of part time volunteers, to offers assistance in various capacities both locally and outside of West African states.
To promote and co-ordinate networking of West Africans living abroad to take interest in and contribute towards the development of West Africa.
Mission Statement
To provide financial assistance to under privileged children in order to access primary and secondary education, within West African States, particularly those nations that have been devastated by conflict. In providing financial assistance Child Aid West Africa, aims to assist in meeting direct expenses associated in schooling such as school fees, as well as meeting expenses such as transportation, and educational materials required by individual children. Whilst improving access to existing educational facilities CAWA also hope to sensitize communities through rural outreach programs, on the importance of sending children to school, and in general promoting basic literacy and numeracy.
Providing supports for sound education, educational workshop and training for parent (parenting), and library facilities for the children in need.
Child Aid West Africa will need your help.
CHILD AID WEST AFRICA, is a legal organizations herein the Netherland.