Knowledge Management in Vocational Training - A Case Study of the EU Project RELOAD

The need of diverse businesses to qualify their employees by means of vocational training is in most cases connected with high efforts due to expensive face-to-face courses and downtimes of the employees. Although, the emergence of IT-based knowledge management and e-learning tools led to a broader range of education possibilities during the last years, the fact remained that too many approaches were not user- or learner-centred. Besides, a lot of vocational training approaches did not include modern didactic concepts which foster a self-directed way of learning. Hence a stronger consideration of the interplay of the aspects “human, organisation and technology” – the so called HOT-Approach – can help to overcome this challenge. Referring to this, a successful case study is presented with the EU Project RELOAD in this paper. The focus of the project RELOAD is set on employees of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) industry in which employees as well as consultants play a decisive role because they communicate directly with end customers during sales and consulting talks. Due to the fact that a lot of employees and consultants in this sector are untrained, low qualified workers, or even workers from other sectors, a tailor-made vocational training is necessary. With regard to this, RELOAD tries to address employees and customers at the same time by offering a knowledge platform as a semantic-based solution. This platform contains e-learning modules enabling the users to actualise their knowledge much more efficient, faster and self-directed than by the use of conventional vocational training approaches. Moreover, this kind of self-directed learning can easily be integrated into dynamic daily work processes and at the same time it is more cost-efficient. As a consequence of the project results, various DIY retailers show interest to use and further develop the RELOAD knowledge platform. With regard to this, new ideas and needs for research are elaborated by the project consortium to set up a following-up project in future.