If you lived for more than 5 minutes anywhere, you would notice that human thinking is diverse. We tend to differ wildly, so there are a few things that we all agree upon by consensus.
However, wherever you go, everyone will agree and approve that we must educate ourselves. This is one of the few universals.
And let’s be honest: why do most people sacrifice a quarter of their lives to learn? Well, we want to get a good job and make money.
Be it in school or learning by doing, the role of education in enterprise innovation is undeniable, and this article will seek to analyze the subject and education’s impact on both small and large enterprises.
Importance of education from all sources
If you repeatedly do something over and over, you get better at it. This is how the nervous system and memory functions.
By this logic, many people tend to undervalue formal education via schooling. The argument is that school doesn’t train you to innovate and think for your job. It only trains you to take tests. So, from kindergarten to the time you finish college, you will be an expert test taker and nothing more. You can even skip taking exams by paying someone to do your research paper for you.
People who think in such a manner tend to say that every job can be learned by doing.
On the other side of the coin, we have those who overvalue education. They are credentials and much too focused on your diploma instead of your actual knowledge.
But if you are running small innovative companies, you will need both.
Indeed, schooling does not produce particularly innovative or capable employees. Many people just get a diploma as a ticket to the middle class. They don’t remember or care about what they studied. Most jobs are genuinely learned by doing, and experience is the best teacher.
However, as the world evolves and changes, technology is getting more and more demanding. Depending on your field of activity, formal education’s impact on enterprise growth is vital.
For example, you can’t be a good chemist if you didn’t go to school and actually worked with chemicals before.
For STEM-related jobs, there is simply not enough time to catch up and learn by doing. A mixture of both book smarts and street smarts is essential.
Education is not a process. It is an environment.
People tend to think methodically when it comes to education and learning, but people are not computers that you can just program.
Let’s say that you have an employee, and you need to teach him/her about a specific technology. The laziest option would be to give this person documentation and let him/her learn. However, facilitating a course or training can be insufficient.
The best companies in the world invest heavily in creating an educational environment. In fact, one of the first things that you learn in management is that the work environment can be a trump card or a veto card.
Overperformers can fail, and underperformers can succeed if the right environment is created.
To be more concrete, paying for courses is an essential first step. However, you also need to clear the way in scheduling and encourage a culture of mentoring, support, and asking questions. If you set out a hyper-competitive vibe, people will stop learning because they will hesitate to show their vulnerability by asking questions.
Measurable, deliverable benefits
Innovative strategies through education have to produce results, not just a feeling of confidence. So, how does education affect your bottom line?
Well, for small companies, if you are successful, things will always feel like you are chronically understaffed. A strict, rigid org chat with well-defined roles doesn’t fit a small enterprise well. If you have only a few people, everyone needs to pitch to a certain degree.
People who start their careers in small enterprises are used to the DIY mentality and generally tend to be more outside-the-box thinkers because there are fewer resources to go around.
Meanwhile, large enterprises need education to survive, especially in the Tech field.
The market is always shifting and changing. A few years ago, Cloud technology was a global trend, and now AI is the hot thing.
It can be very hard for a large company, with dozens of departments, maybe even spread across multiple countries, to shift everything in order to chase trends. Reskilling and feeding the need for innovation will only happen if the company invests in education and innovative ideas to improve business.
Even though it is harder and more expensive, large enterprises have the chance to create vast pools of knowledge, internal libraries, workshops, and other benefits that can only occur when the company is large.
Communication
You can’t learn something without someone communicating information to you.
Small enterprises are more agile. They can shift their entire strategy overnight because only a small number of people have to get the memo. Communication and learning are also quicker because, most likely, everyone knows everybody else.
People have each other’s personal numbers, share notes, and ask each other for help organically. It is simpler to visualize the end-to-end product.
Meanwhile, large enterprises can be like small countries. Each area, department, and geography can function on such a scale that going from one department to other feels like changing companies.
Here, people don’t know all of their co-workers, and most aren’t aware of all the possible roles inside such a company.
It’s like staring at a very large building from up close: you can only see a bit of the wall.
In this case, education must bridge that gap. Departments have to understand each other via education, and these exchanges of information can also aid in networking. As mentioned in a previous point, people will train each other in time if you create and foster the right environment. A work culture that is supportive is worth more than gold.
Dynamic marketplace
We briefly mentioned market trends in a previous point. Education plays a role in adapting to market trends and meeting the particular needs of companies.
In large companies, everything is built and established. You can’t really stick your nose where it doesn’t belong because someone will yell at you to get off their lawn. The size of corporations brings stability, but it also threatens stagnation. However, these larger firms have larger war chests and can afford to purchase more quality education and equipment for their employees.
In small enterprises, employees will be given more freedom to look around, test everything, and generally apply creativity. This is essential in catching up to market trends, which seem to come up every 1.5 years.
Conclusion
The size of an enterprise creates different needs. Smaller companies are more agile and generally offer more freedom to explore, but they also have smaller budgets and less stability.
Meanwhile, massive corporations are cumbersome and gigantic, but they offer stability and larger budgets for investing in growth.
Regardless of these issues, education is the answer for both larger and smaller enterprises. The solutions may manifest differently, but there is no doubt that a company cannot survive without being good at proliferating knowledge and training its people.
