About the conference
The conference will focus on the measures for policy makers and practitioners that reflect how today’s SMEs operate and learn, and that would truly support SMEs with their (digital) learning journey. It will bring together policy makers, hands-on practitioners and industry professionals, including course developers and publishers, with a shared interest in technology-enhanced learning.
Investing in skills
Rapid technological and social changes force every high-tech company to regularly advance the skills of its employees. This is particularly challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), that hardly have any resources available for employee training, be it time, finance or knowledge.
At the same time, online training solutions offer cost-effective, flexible and accessible way to educate staff. Such solutions refer to video content, mobile learning, MOOCs, Virtual and Augmented Reality, gamification, Artificial Intelligence etc. Online training and SMEs seem to be a ‘match made in heaven’. However, in reality, the adoption of online training by European SMEs happens at an unacceptably slow pace.
Technology as 'second-order problem'
Small companies are now uniting into clusters, the role of trade unions starts decreasing. The mind-set of today’s start-ups is completely different from small companies from a few years ago. The role of learning providers is changing, with centralized top-down approaches shifting towards decentralized bottom-up learning. Learners themselves become increasingly engaged in generating knowledge, with the growing importance of peer-to-peer learning. Many of the approaches and solutions for online training that exist today do not match the learning realities and needs of modern SMEs.
About Nadine Roijakkers
Dr. Nadine Roijakkers is program director yOUrMBA at the Open Universiteit in Heerlen, the Netherlands. Besides her career in academia, she was a senior strategy consultant at Atos-KPMG Consulting in the Netherlands, where she advised global companies on their collaborative strategies and practices for a number of years. Nadine has published numerous articles and books on alliance management and (open) innovation management.
For more information and to register, visit the conferencesite.