Continuing Education and Training: Not Just the Employee’s BurdenSkilled engineers seek further training and development through their employers

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53% of the global respondents from

the KGWI said that it was more important to change employers in

order to grow their careers and further their skills

57% of engineers surveyed in the chemical industry said they’ll

need to upgrade their skills within the next 12 – 24 months to keep up

with advances in the profession

72% of engineers surveyed in the computers and electronics

industry said they’ll need to upgrade their skills within the

same time frame

It’s a shared responsibility

Despite a very tight labor market for engineers in many industries today, where candidates have their pick of opportunities, it’s still incumbent on engineering employees to make sure they remain hirable. They must be current on skills, know where to look for the right jobs, and have the ability to incorporate sophisticated social media into the job search process.

Yet this doesn’t mean that employers are off the hook. In highly technical professions such as engineering, in fact, a company’s ability to play a role in developing skills may be just as important as the skills a worker brings to the table. Why? Because workforce experts know that the global labor market of the future is really just all about people. If an organization doesn’t know how to get them—and keep them—by offering valuable training opportunities, that organization could soon be surpassed by others who have figured out the right formula for keeping the best talent on board.

Continuing education can help attract and retain engineering talent

Key results from the 2012 Kelly Global Workforce Index™ (KGWI) indicate just how important it is for an organization to take training seriously. Of the 170,000 global respondents spanning nearly every industry, more than half, 53 percent, indicated that it was more important to change employers in order to grow their careers and further develop their skills. Seventy-four percent indicated that the ability to excel and develop skills on the job is a key to deriving meaning from their work.

Other results that focus specifically on what engineers in a variety of fields expect from their careers indicate that training opportunities are even more important in highly technical fields. The results from the KGWI show that those in professional and technical fields are significantly more likely than non- professional/technical workers to feel it is important to change employers when it comes to staying current with career development and skills.

Clearly, training cannot be overlooked. But it is often a difficult proposition in the current economy. Even global companies that seem to have endless resources are experiencing the same struggles to do more with less—just like smaller firms around the world. Providing training opportunities for employees is expensive. And in an age of free agents who are highly skilled and can be hired for specific projects, it’s not unreasonable for employers to expect that the people they hire will know exactly how to get the job done from day one.

Continuing education naturally improves the value of engineering employeesBut even highly skilled engineers who are currently employed know that training and continuing education are important aspects of their careers. In the chemical industry, for example, more than half, 57 percent, of the engineers surveyed said they’ll need to upgrade their skills within the next 12 to 24 months in order to keep up with advances in the profession, according to primary research conducted by Kelly®. An even bigger percentage, 72 percent, of engineers working in computers and electronics said that they’ll need to upgrade their skills within the same time frame.

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The major challenge for companies in constructing training

programs is ensuring that their program is viable from a “dollars

and sense” standpoint: will this program be economical for your

company? Will it be valuable to your employees?

But how are these engineers expecting to accomplish this goal? For them, it’s not an entirely go-it-alone proposition. Half of those in the chemical industry rated structured, on-the-job training opportunities as one of the three most important training and development types. About 45 percent of engineers working in computers and electronics said that “formal training programs” and structured, on-the-job experience are also critical in their quests for ongoing training and education in their careers.

In almost any modern manufacturing plant—even in mainstream industries like automotive or consumer products—manufacturing engineers need to be knowledgeable about process automation and controls technologies in order to remain relevant to employers.

New challenges in developing training programs These results make it clear that workers—even those who are highly skilled—know how important it is to keep their skills up-to-date, and that they are largely expecting to reap those benefits from the workplace.

A major challenge for companies, then, will be to figure out how to develop effective training programs that provide real value to their employees. These opportunities are a critical draw for the world’s most talented workers in the current age of free agency, and it just makes sense to invest in this kind of talent in order to retain them. After all, these workers will likely become a company’s most valued resources in the workplace of the future where an organization’s institutional knowledge will be just as important as its ability to produce.

But a second major challenge will be to develop training programs that also make financial sense. The cost is not likely to go down, and finding alternative ways of providing the best training possible will be just as valuable to companies as the skills their employees are able to acquire.

Fortunately for organizations, workforce solutions experts are moving toward the task of not only finding the best candidates, but training them as well as possible. There will always be a continued need to source the best talent for a specific job. But moving forward, the best workforce partners will also understand that drawing from a talent pool is only possible if that talent pool has the resources available to continually keep up on valuable skills. A company looking for effective workforce solutions should therefore always look for a workforce partner that is striving to bridge the gap by maintaining its own training methods and programs.

Invest in and retain your talentFor example, in some cases, Kelly, a leading global workforce solutions provider, has partnered with higher education institutions to develop these programs, or has helped organizations build customizable training programs that they can rely on far into the future. After all, it’s no longer good enough for corporations or workforce experts to simply shuffle talent around—we all must collaborate to develop talent, too, in order to always have the right candidates on hand.

As the world’s workforce continues to rapidly evolve, so too should the ability of organizations to meet all the challenges of building a meaningful workforce model that works for them. Continuing education and training will remain critical tools in that quest, and Kelly is helping to ensure that the world’s best organizations are able to fulfill these expectations.

Kelly® offers online coursework that’s available to help engineers prepare for

critical, in-demand credentials within their disciplines, including Project Management

Professional (PMP) Certification Prep, Certified Six Sigma Green Belt (SSGB)

Test Prep, and Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (SSBB) Test Prep.

Kelly Engineering Resources® is a registered trademark of Kelly Services

An Equal Opportunity Employer. © 2012 Kelly Services, Inc. X1442A Supply #960 R11/12 Visit us on kellyservices.us/engineering

About Kelly Services®

Kelly Services, Inc. (NASDAQ: KELYA, KELYB) is a leader in providing

workforce solutions. With specialization in the scientific industry, Kelly®

offers a comprehensive array of outsourcing and consulting services

as well as world-class staffing on a temporary, temporary-to-hire, and

direct-hire basis. Serving clients around the globe, Kelly provides

employment to more than 550,000 employees annually. Revenue in

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Since employing its first engineer in 1965, the Kelly engineering

specialty has grown to be recognized as a leading provider of

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chemical, defense, electronics, energy, medical device and

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