2023-08-29 22:00:00
Further training is still very popular with Austrian companies. This is also shown by the annual study by the adult education platform for 2023. It is also used by many companies as a means of combating the shortage of skilled workers – combined with increased digitization.
For the 15th time, the Platform for Vocational Adult Education (PbEB) carried out the study “Further Education in Austria” in spring together with MAKAM Research. A representative sample of 400 HR managers and management in companies with more than 20 employees were surveyed. Central result: The importance of further training in Austrian companies remains at a high level, and this is also increasingly due to the blatant shortage of skilled workers.
Increasing importance of further training
In more than half of the companies (54 percent), further training will become more important in the coming years than it has been so far, 46 percent see the value at least as remaining the same. More than every third company (35 percent) included more funds for further training in the budget for 2023 than in 2022. For comparison: ten years ago it was 17 percent of the companies, less than half. Six out of ten plan to invest in their own staff at least on the same scale as in the previous year. An average of five training/further education days are invested per employee and year.
Broken down by further training measures, the top 3 are personality development (40 percent), IT & EDP applications (38 percent) and technology & production (36 percent), followed by marketing and sales, management/corporate management and health/employees/ in fourth to sixth place. -internal protection.
Trends in further education: focus on IT skills, future technologies and resilience
IT skills, future technologies/green jobs and resilience are considered to be the continuing education topics that will gain most importance in the coming years. Measures on the topic of remote leadership are most frequently mentioned as stagnating or declining in importance. Further training in the area of certified skills is becoming more important compared to the previous year. While purely digital and hybrid forms of teaching/learning, which account for a total of around 40 percent of the planned further training measures, are maintaining their importance at the previous year’s level, pure face-to-face training (57 percent of all planned measures) is becoming more important compared to the previous year (53 percent).
Further training can compensate for the lack of skilled workers
In general, the companies strongly agree with the statements that further training prepares for the future, keeps them competitive, ensures future company success, is important for employee retention and: can partially compensate for the lack of qualified workers.
Keyword employees: As in the previous year, two out of three companies will be affected by the lack of qualified employees in 2023, and one in five companies will even report a very large shortage. 31 percent are countering the lack of qualified personnel with increased investments in further training, a quarter are trying to compensate for the shortage by intensifying digitization measures. A quarter also reports that the shortage is the reason for the rejection of orders, 15 percent complain regarding the loss of customers, and at least five percent are faced with downsizing the company due to the shortage of employees.
Advertisements in online job exchanges are an important source for filling vacancies for almost three quarters of the companies. Two out of three companies rely on recommendations when recruiting employees, 44 percent rely on classic job advertisements in print media. LinkedIn is the most important social media application for finding employees, with 36 percent of domestic companies using it. 19 percent use Xing for this purpose, and 16 percent use Facebook or Instagram. Every fourth company uses the services of personnel consultants and headhunters (rather larger companies) or the AMS (primarily trade and industry).
Digitization of the working world: curse and blessing for companies
The digitization of the working world is both a blessing and a curse for companies in other areas: on the one hand, it also counteracts the shortage of skilled workers, on the other hand, 42 percent of all companies surveyed are severely affected by at least one associated challenge. Companies most often have to struggle with maintaining the corporate culture despite new forms of work and with the integration of employees working from home.
However, more than every second company has a positive view of the rapid developments in the digital field of artificial intelligence (AI), and a good quarter have a negative view. Around a fifth do not want or cannot commit themselves yet. While those who are positive regarding AI argue that it primarily means improving existing work processes, skeptics see a possible loss of the human aspect. In further education, two out of ten companies already have more or less concrete expectations on the subject of AI from institutionalized providers of education and training. Continuing education providers should focus their relevant training on AI knowledge transfer, which should be tailored to the needs of the respective company, but also to the individual needs of the individual employees. It seems important to the companies that, despite the rapid development in this segment, people with their diverse interactions are not lost.
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