Introduction
Effective and qualitative education is a core of any profession as it gives future private and public employees a chance to master knowledge and skills crucial for effective performance. Management education is important because it supplies future managers and administrators with knowledge and innovative ideas, practical examples and analytical skills. Workplaces structure and routinely provide learning experiences as part of everyday work activities and through guidance from other workers. It does provide managers with theories and innovative ideas applicable in modern organizations.
Main body
Management education is crucial for private and public organizations because it provides managers with ready-made knowledge and skills. in additional to education, participation in workplace tasks assists new learning and reinforces what has been learnt through further practice (Drucker 2004). This account of the workplace’s contributions to learning is consistent with contemporary learning theories, which helps substantiate the case for workplaces to be seen as legitimate and effective learning environments. Adult education and lifelong education is important for every profession because it allows a person to update his skills and meet high standards and demands of an industry. Management education (including lifelong learning) aims to assist those wishing to learn about and develop further their vocational practice through participation in work. Such is their specialization that no courses currently exist—or are ever likely to be viable—through either public or private provisions of education (Amdam, 1996).
Individuals who are effective at work, who can handle difficult tasks such as those illustrated above, possess particular attributes. Technically, it is referred to as expertise. These are the individuals from whom others seek advice about how to approach a difficult task (Drucker 2004). Their attributes set them apart from less experienced workers and are also the qualities that other workers aspire to and employers wish more of their employees possessed. These attributes represent the kind of outcomes that should be developed through workplace learning. In order to assist the development of expertise, we need to understand the attributes that constitute expert performance at work (Amdam, 1996). This enables the identification of the goals for workplace learning and selecting particular strategies to most effectively generate expertise in workers. Understanding these attributes can also help establish bases for guiding the development of and judgments about the effectiveness of workplace learning arrangements.
According to Amdam (1996) in public and private administration skill in performance is the criterion of learning, and such skill requires an efficiency in motions and perceptions that can be acquired only through practice; it is not instantaneously acquired but develops. Both public and private industries are dealing with relatively complex perceptual-motor tasks, the execution of which must become increasingly proficient and must finally be fixed in habit at a high level of performance. This process is not to be confused with the eliciting of a few simple motions, requiring little or no skill development, to satisfy a performance criterion little concerned with degrees of excellence (Drucker 2004). The value of management education is indisputable; but to be of maximum value the practice should be done under guidance. In management education, the instructor’s role must therefore go beyond the beginning modeling, for the purpose of priming the performance, to a continuation of the coaching function as the trainee engages in actual performance. Additional explanations and demonstrations are usefully employed, as the employee’s performance improves, to emphasize the remaining refinements to be achieved (O’Neill and Fletcher 1998). When the trainee undertakes the task and its refinements, the instructor should be actively engaged in cueing the trainee in regard to upcoming acts and in responding to what is done with specific feedback information on errors (accompanied by further demonstration if the difficulties are complex) and with reinforcement (recognition and approval) of good or improving execution (Bradley, 2004). During education, the coach’s objective is to give needed help but gradually to shift the burden of picking up the feedback indications to the trainee. Analytic thinking in philosophy seeks to understand the assumptions and methods upon which common sense and science depend. It even turns attention inward to the basic elements of philosophy itself, attempting to gain a clear conception of the meaning of terms and to develop a careful examination of arguments (Drucker 2004).
The value of management education is that public and private managers cannot rely heavily on indications from experience within their own organizations and on indications, largely experience-based. Education can teach authentic lessons if the training process is insightfully observed. An appraisal that will serve to identify training needs must relate to the specific activities within the realm of the supervisor’s responsibilities and functions (O’Neill and Fletcher 1998). Managerial and supervisory training programs simply have not been subjected to adequate evaluation studies for establishment of effectiveness; consequently, a human resources practitioner looking for guidance in selecting effective kinds of programs of this type will find relatively few programs of soundly determined effectiveness. In those instances in which actual studies have been made, the results have not been highly encouraging. It cannot rely on indexes of outcomes alone but must be based on a critical observation of what the supervisor is actually doing–and on a judgment as to whether the actions performed and the manner of performance will contribute to the delayed objective results to which the actions are related. Such observations must be long enough to give the appraiser a real “fix” on what the supervisor is doing, and the judgment of effectiveness must be a professional one based on the knowledge, developed through experience, of the association between interim indications of effect and ultimate outcomes (Drucker 2004). The vehicle for an adequate evaluation of performance, whether objective indexes exist or not, is not a checklist of responsibilities and functions, since such global indications are not observable, but a list of specific activities the supervisor is assigned to carry out. It may be found that the supervisors are not taking certain expected actions or are taking superfluous actions, in which case the appraisal can serve as a basis for building the missing activities into skilled execution and for eliminating the purposeless activities. In most cases, however, the appraisal is not concerned with establishing a basis for stopping the supervisors from engaging in certain activities or for having them initiate certain others (O’Neill and Fletcher 1998). The educators will usually be found to be making an effort, if their original training has comprehensively covered the job as it should, to carry out just about all of the activities that are expected of them; and they may insightfully pare or expand certain activities on their own. The crux of the purpose of the appraisal is not an adding or subtracting of activities but an improvement in their execution. The idea is not to determine simply what the other managers are doing but how well they are doing (Schermerhorn, 2007).
Education leadership helps private and public managers to introduce new concepts and theories into practice. Differences in the requirements for work extend beyond the purely technical nature of the activities. The scope for working autonomously, and the management of that work—its discretion— can vary widely. Also, whether work requires specialization within a set of particular tasks or has more multi-functional roles will differ across and within workplaces (Drucker 2004). Nevertheless, the technical components of vocational practice determine part of the requirements for work performance. The nature of work and work practice is also constantly changing, thereby demanding fresh appraisals of what constitutes performance at work (Casey 1999). For instance, the use of technology has become so widespread that it is now accepted as a normal part of most people’s work Changes in work practice have also seen the centralization or concentration of the management and organization of work through electronic means. Production cycles are becoming shorter and more transformational, as are the means by which production occurs. The requirements for many kinds of work are probably underestimated. Understanding the demands of vocational practice, and how these are perceived, has a significant impact on the standing of the work and how expertise is valued. One legacy of Taylorism is the lowly standing of many vocations (Amdam, 1996). Taylorism involved the breaking down of work tasks into small, reutilized and de-skilled components—to separate the mental requirements from the manual performance of the task—in order to enhance management control over work tasks. Few would dispute the demands and complexity of work classified as ‘professional’ or ‘technical’. However, although often unrecognised, similar demands are often a part of work labeled ‘semi-skilled’, ‘unskilled’and ‘operative’. Such work has been shown to require the ability to respond to new workplace tasks as often as professional occupations (Drucker 2004).
Management education allows private and public managers effectively monitor the task as it is being performed, and use that monitoring to assist in the task’s successful completion. This monitoring comprises the expert testing and refining of their selected responses to a problem. Situational factors of workplaces play an important role in determining the activities to be undertaken and the goals that are desirable in those workplaces. It is against these activities and goals that performances are judged, rather than some abstract notion of vocational competence. “Professional development will be valued by a very wide range of people, from those with little formal education to those with a strong academic background, from those in senior positions in larger organizations to the single staff member” (O’Neill & Fletcher 1996, p. 43).
How management practice is conducted, the changes in that practice and the difficulties of learning the attributes required for responding to new tasks all have to be considered. At one level, management practices and the need for particular sets of skills are determined in the broader community (i. e. the need for particular goods and services) and will change as these needs evolve. However, these needs give rise to sets of understandings and procedures that characterize particular management positions. It is these management positions that provide a consistent line of work and development. However, some jobs require more than one set of vocational knowledge. This again suggests that, as well as knowledge of the management positions, how that position is manifested in a particular workplace needs to be accounted for in understanding management expertise (Schermerhorn, 2007).
Conclusion
In sum, management education is crucial for organizational success because it becomes a knowledge shared activity. Some of this learning is of the kind that learners would not discover alone. The contribution of this shared or collaborative learning is interactions between individuals that are the basis of individuals’ learning. Guiding a novice in achieving improved performance with a work task is a specific contribution that close guidance can provide in the workplace. The quality of learning in workplaces is therefore premised on the availability of access to routine and non-routine activities that will assist individuals to learn new knowledge and develop that knowledge further through practice and guidance. Much of this is provided freely in workplaces; however, it is difficult to simulate or reproduce these kinds of guidance or authentic workplace experiences elsewhere. Management education is important because it is based on ideas of lifelong learning and education lairdship crucial for every modern organization.
Bibliography
Amdam, R. P. 1996, Management, Education and Competitiveness: Europe, Japan and the United States. Routledge.
Bradley, B. 2004, Generating and Sustaining Nonprofit Earned Income. Jossey-Bass; 1 edition.
Drucker, P. F. 2004, Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Collins.
O’Neill, M. Fletcher, K. 1998, Nonprofit Management Education: U.S. and World Perspectives. Praeger Publishers.
Schermerhorn, J. 2007, Management. Wiley.