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Show Notes
Kala Philip calls herself a learning and development professional with an Indian cultural background. She started the learning and development professional journey 20 years ago.
Kala’s first franchisee L&D business was called “The Education”. Before starting her franchise business, she was a high school teacher for six years, helping students from a migrant background.
After this experience, Kala decided to get into adult education and moved to Dubai for a new technical and professional development training opportunity. From Dubai, Kala moved to Australia, where she worked for two companies. The first was a business doing professional development for the top companies in Australia. BSI Leaning was the next opportunity and has proven to be a fantastic experience. She became the first female director on the board in 2018 and, more recently, the role of COO.
The work at BSI Learning has been purposeful because they are training the disadvantaged and people with lower abilities than the average population. On top of this, BSI Learning also takes executive education to a new level by helping to create great leaders and encouraging more women on boards and in entrepreneurial roles. Also on the BSI Learning agenda is education for prison inmates aimed at skilling them up for new opportunities.
We are using education to change lives. Our Vision is “Changing a Million lives by 20230” keeps us focused and motivated.
Training has transitioned from being transactional and academic to be more about having different modalities, catering for different learning styles, and how it is best to cater for micro-credentials.
Employers who are looking for employees to get up to speed in a few months. They cannot wait several months. Therefore the training has been remodelled to address specific skill sets and is much more related to the application in the workplace.
There are core competencies like health and safety and emotional intelligence. Still, trainees are considering cross skills, which may include project management, customer service, and cyber security, if the business needs these skills.
Employees to to cross skill and upskill. This is the most significant change in recent years.
The learning modalities include classroom learning, online self-paced and reading. It is more learner-centric.
Skills that are learned need to be applied back to the workplace.
The decision-makers in companies are the heads of learning and development. This is a role in larger organisations but may be part of a role in smaller companies. The business managers are also part of the decision process because they want to understand the training outcomes, and they match the training needs analysis for the specific business unit.
Once the requirements for the business are understood, they are overlayed on an individual learning journey. Nobody can afford to start from point zero and relearn skills already mastered. Every learning journey is unique.
Previous learning, experience and on job learning help form each employee's learning journey.
The lowest level in the community sets the level of literacy. There can be gaps in diverse & ethnic, aboriginal and Torres strait, migrant, prison and socio-economically diverse communities. Raising literacy levels is a huge requirement. BSI Learning works with various NPO and government organisations to support training needs in different communities.
Increasing literacy levels opens doors to further education opportunities and broadens work possibilities.
It is essential to understand how children learn and how adults learn. Teaching similar skills to people who may not have had the opportunity or the English experience requires a specific approach, adult learning methodology. The method for adults is much more vocationally focused.
The trends in India and SE Asia show that the focus is gradually moving from a purely academic approach to a more skills-based and vocation-focused priority.
India recognizes the Australian training system and training systems that have globally recognized qualifications. If I can run a café business in Sydney, then it should be good training to run a café anywhere in the world.
English as a second language is less of a problem. People are looking for more transnational opportunities.
In Summary:
Education is a means of growing skills for direct application in the short term compared with the traditional academic approach. How can I upskill and cross-skill myself for immediate application in the workplace?
Businesses need to understand the tasks the business needs to operate effectively. Does the company have what is required and what needs to be done to fill the skills gaps?
Education has a benefit for society. There is a risk of having an underskilled community. Increased incarceration rates, long-term poverty and low job readiness are some of the social outcomes of an underskilled community.
A globalized economy requires trust in standards of education and training. Once this is established trans national opportunities open up for individuals.
Life-long learning and continuous learning are authentic and bring benefits across the globe.