Spencer Education for the New

Spencer Education for the new economy: Human capital and new human resource management Businesses are in business to make money. Just as businesses use technological and material resources to enhance their workplace capabilities and ultimately their 'bottom line,' they also use human resources to increase their revenue. Educated human resources are often superior in terms of the value they can add to an organization.

This idea is exemplified in the slogan "our employees are our most valuable resources," although this cliche is often used to suggest that an organization is caring, rather than craven. But when employees are viewed as resources, are they really treated as human beings, valuable or not? The evidence suggests this is not the case, and to truly educate employees, it is necessary to treat them as individuals, not as resources to be exploited.

A liberal arts education provided by a university and a learning environment at work yields better results than a narrow technical education and an emphasis on standard operation procedures and reaching set benchmarks. It is not always so clear that greater expenditures upon adult education yield a profit for all organizations in the short-term, of course. True, for some industries demanding employees with high-level skills, making an investment in the training of workers is essential to day-to-day operations.

The better the employee is on the computer, the more up-to-date the it professional's skills, the better the service or product. Thus fostering loyalty within the hearts and minds of employees, providing them with good benefits packages, and creating a healthy workplace environment will ensure the retention of valuable company assets. This might be called the 'Google' model.

Not only does Google boast yoga classes during lunch and a free gourmet selection of cafeterias for employees: "The company's engineers are given 20% of their time to pursue their own ideas instead of company assignments," to facilitate employee learning in the service of the company and employee creativity (Loher 2005). While this model has reaped impressive dividends for Google, for other companies, such as McDonald's, using employees as disposable commodities in the majority of lower level jobs might seem more effective if they keep their eye on the short-term bottom line.

"Almost every fast-food restaurant in Colorado Springs has a banner or a sign that says, now hiring...fast-food operators have little control over their fixed costs: their leases, franchise fees and purchases from company-approved suppliers. As a result, they are under constant pressure to keep wages as low as possible. From opening time until early afternoon, most of the fast-food workers appear to be immigrants, high school dropouts, middle-aged housewives and senior citizens. After that the workforce behind the counter seems entirely adolescent" (Schlosser 1998).

From a logical perspective, lessening the rate of attrition in all sectors by fostering the idea that the company is valuing its employees might argue for the applicability of the Google model to all jobs, in all industries, but that does not seem to be the case in reality -- an investment in employee education and use of employee input on all levels of the organization, when such an investment does not turn a quick profit, is seldom made.

The idea of the purpose-driven nature of workplace education also effects how adult education is viewed by society, as manifested in the shift of state funding to vocational training from general education. There has been a paradigm shift regarding adult education on a public and national level, as well as in private enterprise, for the poorer. 'Will this get me a job' is the mantra of students, and now the state.

The ability to learn how to learn is less valued than learning specific skills, ironically at a time where the "information age," has such fast-changing skills demanded of all level of employees that a narrow technical education will not suffice in years to come. Skills learned only a few years ago are now out of date, while basic skills and a quick mind never grow obsolete. Even lower-level employees must think creatively, and can provide input into improving organization's standard operational procedures.

Granted it is argued that not all new employment opportunities are managerial in nature, but even if the 20% figure frequently quoted regarding the percentage of managerial occupations open today, competent lower-level employees who can deal with problems and the public in a creative fashion and perform the secondary and tertiary activities in a manner to make customers want to return cannot be undervalued.

Reduced job security also makes it a moral and social imperative for government educational paradigms to focus on making an investment in people, not viewing people work products. Even if not all workers entering the workforce can be classified as "knowledgeable workers," all workers have to have some knowledge to do their job and to learn new knowledge at their job every day. The knowledge of learning from experience can be fostered in quality adult education programs that are not merely technical in nature.

Basic skills like reading, learning from a manual, generalizing principles through deductive learning, are all critical aspects of education as is the ability to be educated and to change one's professional perspective and paradigm with economic ebbs and flows. Learning at work is an essential aspect of doing quality work, and the desire to learn and to make meaning out of one's work is an innate human impulse and activity.

A frequent polarization of modern enterprise is that of the 'Costco' versus 'Wal-Mart' model, one of which views workers as valuable resources, the other that sees workers as expendable, and tries to keep costs down by limited benefits. Both stores are successful, but one makes a greater commitment to worker satisfaction, the other to shareholder and customer satisfaction. However, the fallacy with both models is that neither really invests in workers' futures, or workers as creative individuals.

To do so creates a learning organization, and long-term improvement, regardless of where the economy may grow. The current sorry state of General Motors is ample evidence of the fact that good benefits and salaries for workers alone is not enough, if these workers cannot be retrained in their skills to meet the needs of the new economy, when a sector such as manufacturing dries up.

An organization must be a learning organization and change with the times and not simply shuttle out the same gas-guzzling vehicles or even the same employee benefits that.