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Short-term professional education and its development in Kazakhstan
К содержанию номера журнала: Вестник КАСУ №4 - 2007
Авторы: Сагиндыкова Ю. А. , Аубакирова А.А.
Kazakhstan
is quickly integrating in the world community by adapting international
standards in many spheres, such as banking, accounting, corporate culture
development, fund markets, including such a key resource as people. Evidently,
for the republic to move on and to succeed in the competitive world, the
quality of human resources should become first on the investment priority list.
There are various ways through which personnel is educated: traditional
education provided in universities, long-term courses, short-term trainings and
seminars, etc.
Traditional
education had been predominant for many years until other ways of getting
equipped with necessary skills appeared, such as seminars and trainings, etc.
Today along with traditional education, trainings and seminars have become
another necessity for hundreds of companies and individuals because of the need
to keep employee’s skills and knowledge up-to-date and fresh. Moreover, besides
just having an educational element, trainings and seminars organized by
companies for their employees is a powerful motivational tool to keep the level
of turnover among personnel down.
Many American
companies spend millions of dollars to educate and train their personnel
according to the rapidly changing time demands and view trained and highly
qualified staff as a strong competitive advantage. The following facts are
startling and display how much importance leading companies of the world assign
to short-term trainings for their employees. For example, General Electric
Corporation annually spends 1 billion dollars for trainings and educational
programs. In 2000 German company BASF invested about 83.3 million Euros into 3237
trainees, and 58 thousand people took qualification increase courses.
Today, many
Kazakhstan companies: government as well as private agencies, invest a lot of
resources to train personnel accordingly. Among the most-known are the
government agencies sending their employees to the state management academy
based in Astana, or Halyk and ABN-AMRO banks, constantly training their
personnel to keep up with the pace of world standards.
It is
Important to note that trainings have not appeared to replace traditional
education as widely believed, but rather perfectly complement it. Kazakhstan
market of short-term personnel education is quite young and would be hard to
compare with such well-established markets as the ones in the USA or Europe.
The latter countries are known for excellent business schools, such as Harvard,
Darden, which besides offering traditional education, are also the main
suppliers of short-term trainings for a variety of famous companies in the US
and Europe. Russian market, for example, is more advanced as well in terms of
information, statistics and quality of trainings.
However,
Kazakhstan’s overall economic development as well as its highly ambitious goals
for the future create a rather favorable atmosphere for a successful
development of this newly emerging market. For the past few years, much has
been achieved in terms of proper dissemination of information among target
audience and improvement of the quality of trainings. Kazakhstan suppliers of
training services vary from international companies with representative offices
in Kazakhstan to locally based companies. Central statistical agency does not
provide any information on the exact number of training companies, or the
volume of the investments in this particular market. Approximately, the total
number is not higher than 100 of companies with about 85% of them based in Almaty,
the republican financial center.
The
timeliness and rationale for analyzing the market of training services in
Kazakhstan is unquestionable and has a remarkable statistical as well as
overall economic importance for all interested users. Due to the lack of deep
analytical researches and accurate statistical data of this market in
Kazakhstan, this leaves a big space for a lot of quite biased and inaccurate
data, which can misinform a casual as well as a professional reader about the
status-quo of the market of training services in Kazakhstan.
Trainings are
not just another fashion trend that does not have a real use and
practicability, but a powerful tool to educate personnel in a way that can
immensely advance the progress of humanity. Business short-term education is
especially valuable at this time because appropriate business skills are what
most business people in Kazakhstan and the whole post-soviet territory. Unfortunately,
many of the existing universities still use outdated curriculums and
syllabuses, which provides the students with a large volume of theoretical
information that is sometimes not applicable to the real-life situations and
deprives the existing higher education of practical value to the professional
future of a student. With this awareness of a theory-based higher education,
the essence of short-term trainings as a newly emerged phenomenon is being
misinterpreted and thus misunderstood.
Russian web-sources
offer various definitions, the predominant number of which puts a special
stress on the superiority of trainings to traditional education, which is in
its root wrong and immature. For example, the analytical article “What is a
training?” on one of the HR portals describes training as “the most widespread
form of modern business education”, where the emphasis is made on the
development of practical skills needed for daily work and the main difference
of training from traditional education is the involvement of its participants.
The definition is very general and therefore should specify “modern form of
short-term business education” rather than just saying “modern form of business
education”.
The second
part of definition indirectly states the fact that traditional education is
boring and its participants are usually passive and thus exalts the superiority
of trainings as a better substitute of education. This underlying motive is not
very correct, because traditional type and trainings are actually not rivals in
winning new clients but rather partners, i.e. these are not mutually exclusive
but two equally effective coexisting forms of education. Therefore, definition
through emphasizing superiority of the one through putting down the other does
not seem to be objective, but rather is a very biased, subjective definition.
The more
objective definition of the term “trainings” is given on the website of one of
the training centers named “Uspeh” and states that “trainings are a short-term
program, directed at the development of specialized skills, which allows to
absorb a lot of information and to master new professional skills for a short
time period”. However, at the end it is compared once again with the
traditional education as being more practical than the latter one.
The more
sophisticated and complete definitions are given on the website www.treko.ru ,
where the author states that in fact “there is no widely recognized definition
of a training, that would be accepted by all” and thus refers to a variety of
definitions. Some of them describe training as “earlier planned process, the
aim of which is to change the attitude, knowledge or behavior of participants
with the help of educating experience and aimed at the development of certain
skills needed to perform a certain activity”. The aim of training is to
contribute to the development of personality and to satisfy the current and
future needs of a company”. This definition was suggested by the Manpower
Services Commission of Great Britain in 1991.
Another
definition once again ascribes the emergence of short-term trainings to the
impracticability and a quick “deterioration” of knowledge acquired in
traditional institutions. One of the training experts describes training as a
special way of education, that is based not on declarative, but on real
knowledge, giving the opportunity to experience what the lecture essentially
says, after which he presents a lot of examples of “declarative knowledge”,
which is hardly of any of practical use. He ends by stating that “group
psychological training is a method of intentional changes of a man, aimed at
his or her professional and personal development through acquisition, analysis
and reevaluation by him or her own experience in a context of group
interaction”. The latter definition sounds very scientific and mainly describes
psychological trainings rather than provides general explanation of what a
training is.
This
confusion with proper and accurate definitions proves that there is a clear
misunderstanding in post-soviet area of what a real training and its role are.
One of the articles brings up this issue and refers to two wrong ideas that are
resent in the consciousness of educational community: all the differences
between academic and short-term business education are made up, and secondly,
development of short-term business education poses a threat to the success of
traditional education. Evidently, trainings have not come to replace
traditional education but to perfectly complement it. The table below carefully
describes the main differences between traditional or academic as it is called
in some web sources and short-term education.
The table
seems to more or less objectively reflect some of the differences between
traditional and short-term business education. It evidently narrows the
diversity of different trainings to those focused on the development of
business skills, but nevertheless covers some aspects of all trainings, which
makes it a good visual depiction to better understand that traditional
education and trainings are two distinct types of education and cannot be
rivals in educational world. Moreover, it employs a very simple language and
avoids very complicated ideas to make this table highly interpretable. Some of
its fields seem to be obsolete, such as traditional education nowadays as
opposed to the one during soviet times is rather costly and at times even more
than a short-term training. However, in terms of curriculums, the table hits
the target by stating that training materials are developed by trainers while
the university curriculums – by scientists.
All of the
stated differences also indicate that two types of education are aimed at
different target audiences, which makes two types of education perfectly
coexisting. Traditional education (Bachelor’s, Master’s, PhD) targets fresh
high school graduates, middle-career professionals with sufficient study time
at their disposal, professors, scientists, etc., whereas short-term education
covers especially busy people, such as top management. Sometimes the reason for
choosing a short-term training rather than traditional education is the desire
to develop some skills, such as related to MS office or interpretation of
scientific terms, while can be developed within a short time period. The choice
of either short-term training or traditional education varies from person to
person, from company to company.
The purpose
of the article is to confront some of the stereotypes related to the emergence
and rapid development of trainings on the post-soviet territory. This article
directly addresses some apprehensions of some people about the aggressive
growth and marketing by many training institutions. However, these fears and
misconceptions are inevitable and completely understandable because the market
is quite new and the traditional education is not very strong. This confusion
should be temporary until the training centers and the rest of population will
view a newly emerged type of education as an excellent complement to existing
traditional education rather than its alternative.
The reasons
for these widespread misconceptions about trainings are obvious. The western
market views these two types of education as perfectly coexisting. Looking back
into the history, in western countries this market was highly developed a long
before 1991, such famous schools as Darden, Harvard business schools have been
providing traditional long education as well as short-term trainings.
Interesting to note that these training centers are part of universities which
indicates that the gap between usual education and reality at work is not as
big as it is in Kazakhstan or other former Soviet Union countries, where this
gap is so big that training services are viewed as much better alternative to
the usual education, which is quite logical, because the quality of education
is so outdated with some of the teachers still implementing old programs, and
is not very practical, which leaves today’s graduates with a poor set of skills
and barely demanded by the companies.
Ideally, the
traditional education should not be a rival to the short-term trainings, which
is the case in Kazakhstan and other CIS countries. Harvard Business School is
the perfect evidence that traditional and short-term trainings are both equally
effective and necessary in bringing up a professional with relevant skills and
knowledge. Therefore, there is a growing necessity for providing the proper
information and educating the public, human resource managers and upper and
middle-level management about the role and functions of the short-term business
education compared to the traditional education, especially, considering the
market for the short-term education in Kazakhstan is emerging and growing at a
fast pace.
REFERENCES
1. www.exclusive.kz
2. www.top-personal.ru
3. www.seminar.kz
4. www.profit.kz
5. www.hr-forum.kz
6. www.renessans.kz
К содержанию номера журнала: Вестник КАСУ №4 - 2007
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