Abstract:

The paper concerns the issue of further education with a special focus on analysing the methods used most often for further education in organizations and companies (both for-profit and non-profit ones). It presents the results of empirical research containing the data from over 600 companies operating in the Czech Republic. The data was collected by means of a questionnaire distributed to the graduates or current distant students of our faculty who already mostly hold various managerial positions.

The main objective of our research was to compare the usage of particular methods of further education and training, and their effectiveness for achieving the goals of further education. Especially, the research study tries to answer the question, whether organizations are using or not using more often just those methods, which are considered by respondents themselves also as more effective. This research objective has been extended in order to find out the effect of the type of education and training processes, and, furthermore, the effect of the sector of the economy (primary, secondary or tertiary).

The data gained from the questionnaire survey contain information about the frequency (on the ordinal scale) of using particular methods of further education and training, from both on-the-job and off-the-job forms. A usage score averaged over the research sample has been calculated for each of the investigated methods of further education, which enabled to rank these methods according to their usage.

As specified above, to achieve the research objective, the questionnaire also contained the evaluation of the effectiveness of particular methods, derived from their perceived effectiveness based on the experience of respondents themselves. The average perceived effectiveness of particular methods was also calculated, and the methods ranked accordingly. This approach enables to analyse the differences in usage and effectiveness between two main forms of further education and training, which are off-the-job and on-the-job methods.

The investigated organizations were divided according to the type of educational processes into three subsets (organizations concerned only with professional or vocational education, organizations concerned only with the area of development, and finally the organizations concerned with both). With the aim to discover specific features of usage and effectiveness of methods related to the type of educational processes, statistical methods, particularly ANOVA (analysis of variance) was used.

Besides analysing the influence of the type of educational processes, the influence of the sector of economy was investigated. Finally, the relation between the perceived effectiveness of particular methods of further education and the level of employees’ positions was analysed, using ANOVA.

The results should help the organizations to improve their strategies of further education with the aim to increase their effectiveness.

Keywords:

Further education, methods of education and training, effectiveness of education, on-the-job forms, off-the-job forms.