By Andrew Billingsley, Program Development and Strategic Projects Manager, NC State University.

All organizations are challenged today with rapidly changing economic, technical, and social issues. Maintaining an effective, motivated workforce can be achieved with focused customized contractual continuing education programs for a specific group within an organization.

Let me make a suggestion that at first may sound strange. If your company has a training department, do away with it and create a:

Department of Education and Development

The business environment today requires fewer people who are trained more people who are educated in order to find the most effective ways of delivering products to the customer.

"You don't train people; you train animals, and you educate people."

Let's look at this in a different way:
Would you want your teenager to have sex education or sex training?

Education comes from the Latin educo, which means to change from within:

1)    Training provides an external skill. Training deals only with the doing of a task.
2)    Education changes the person. Education teaches people how to think.

Education deals with the knowledge and feeling, the way that you and I respond to stimuli. First we think (knowledge) then we feel, then we act based on that knowledge and feeling.

Education builds in the qualities needed for success.

Training is a necessary part of the broader educational process. Training is essential when a specific skill must be learned, or a specific procedure must be followed consistently within a manufacturing process to maintain quality. But the thinking/education process must be maintained or boredom and low morale sets in.

A very descriptive proverb that conveys this wisdom: when you give people fish, they'll be hungry tomorrow; if you teach them to fish, they'll never go hungry. Training gives your employees a fish -- a specific skill applicable to a specific task. Education teaches them to fish.

Organizations are living units and the food they take in is the education to keep them effect in the face of daily obstacles. Organizations that want to have a long life recognize the responsibility to invest educational resources in developing people, to invest in ways that creates valuable intellectual capital. Teaching employees to think for themselves creates a cultural environment that values education and loyalty to that organization.

• Training focuses on teaching people yesterday's skills and tasks.
• Education focuses on learning and developing tomorrow's skills.

Education without the vision for a better future is only training.

As a country we've spent entirely too much time in the past teaching people:
1) What to do, far too much time getting a job far too much time conforming

Instead of concentrating on:
2)  How they think and how they feel, how they behave; producing excellent results; and creating new idea, processes and products.

Today's organizations must look at the types of people and skill sets available to fulfill corporate strategy and reward this talent for their work.

Executives, too, must go where the action is going to be. We need to look down the road and ask "What kind of company do we want to be, and what kind of employees will it take to get us there?"

To carry out such programs, you need behavioral change agents, not trainers. There are trainers for every subject, are plentiful and inexpensive. Personality test and programs are less plentiful; but they can show you the culture and nature of your staff.

Organizations are typically divided into two groups, mechanistic organizations and thinking organizations. Mechanistic organizations are like machines, doing the same things over and over. Thinking organizations work to stay in front of their industry and evaluating opportunities for growth and product diversity .

Be sure to read next month's Gigabits for Part 2 of this article.

For more information on customized corporate education, contact Andrew Billingsley at  919.513.5080 or andrew_billingsley@ncsu.edu.

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or call 919.515.8163