Does your Employer Need to Offer you Training?

Dutch employers who benefitted from the ‘Noodmaatregel Overbrugging voor Werkgelegenheid (NOW)’ are obliged to encourage their employees to take part in training. The government’s portal for development advice has opened again on 1 December, so there is a need for urgency. Annemarie Künn, expert in lifelong development, explains why the Dutch government made the right call and what exactly your employer should offer you.

Annemarie Künn is a researcher at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics. On behalf of our university, she researched ‘lifelong learning’, a term that she rapidly reframed to ‘lifelong development’, to make it sound more ‘sexy’. That’s what the subject deserves, says Annemarie.

To enable lifelong development, the government allocated € 67 million for development advice and (online) training. The portal to register employees reopened on 1 December. Annemarie is pleased with this development: the labour market has changed very quickly in recent years, due to technological developments, for example, and we keep asking different things from our workers. “You used to learn a trade and that was it, now your trade continues to change and you will have to keep learning while you work,” says Annemarie.

The tricky part is that employees in transitory roles often abandoned their ‘learning mode’ after they graduated. In fact, this group often does not like learning at all. Annemarie explains how you can deal with this: from certified ‘learning on the job’ and using learning ambassadors to visualising the competencies that your organisation will need in future.

In this podcast, hosted by Wendy van Ierschot from BNR News Radio, Annemarie elaborates on the many possibilities available.

If you feel our expertise on professional learning and development can help you and your organisation get ahead, please get in touch and let’s start creating an impact together!