Abstract:

Context:
Lifelong learning can be regarded upon as a bridge facilitating transferability in both directions between education and employment. The continuing professional education is an essential tool for organisations in the framework of the development of human capital, i.e. the improvement and deepening of professional competence (qualification) of their employees. It is particularly important as the effect of achieved education is decreasing with the employees’ age. However, the tools like "on-the-job training“ and continuing education are able to fight and slow down the gradual decrease of competences. Their correct use has certainly an impact on the success and prosperity of the organization. The essential condition of the correct use, however, is using effective methods of continuing education.

Objective:
The objectives of our research and this paper are as follows:
• To analyse which particular methods of lifelong learning and education in companies are considered by employees as the most effective ones.
• To evaluate mutual relations between particular methods of lifelong learning and education in companies and the fact whether these companies are following up the impacts of lifelong learning.
• To find out which concrete indicators of the impact of lifelong learning are most influenced by the use of the most effective methods of education.

These objectives stimulated us to formulating the following research question:
RQ: “Do the companies and organizations that follow up the impact of lifelong learning use more often the more effective methods in comparison with companies not following up their impact?”

Method:
A questionnaire containing 8 questions concerning the assessment of effectiveness of a number of methods used in companies for lifelong learning, the existence of a system of following up the impacts of learning and education and finally specifying their concrete impacts were used and analysed by statistical methods (particularly by Pearson’s chi-squared test of independence and two-sample proportion test). The analysed sample consisted of 124 organizations where our faculty distance students are employed.

Results:
The analysis has shown that specialized workshops and also modern teaching approaches are considered by the respondents as the most effective ones. The results confirmed the positive answer to the research question. The differences between the organizations following up or not following up the impacts of learning and education are statistically significant at the significance level p=0.01.

Conclusion:
The results of this pilot study show that the organizations should pay the attention to following up the impacts of lifelong learning and education. In the opposite case they tend not to use the most effective methods of learning and, therefore, are actually not making the most of the financial means they devote to continuing education and training of their employees. In our further research we would like to show that to invest into further education of employees brings a competitive advantage to organizations.

Acknowledgement:
The work was supported by grant IG F6/16/2016.

Keywords:

Lifelong learning, Professional education, Effectiveness, Impact for organizations, Following up the impacts.