The trend towards digital solutions is also manifest in the changes that production processes are undergoing. How do you respond to the developments towards more and more automated technologies? Since they ultimately mean that fewer highly qualified operators are needed?
Müller: These trends are nothing new. It has always been a challenge to motivate clients to invest in their staff’s expertise. We’re noticing that clients are more readily willing to invest more money in upskilling their qualified staff – building up a fund of expertise here. For their operators, by contrast, they often opt for a maximally efficient approach, not least because they see more turnover there. This does, of course, have its effects on the requirements posed for the training courses we offer. Especially as far as basics are concerned, clients do not want to have to train their operators at six-month intervals.
But in the process of advancing the substantive content of the Academy’s portfolio, we also place a major emphasis on in-house subjects from the field of corporate research and development – for instance, from the keynote issue of Connected Line, we’re distilling vital requirements for trainings to do with completely networked client lines.
At the same time, digital media open new avenues which we’re using to meet our clients’ needs and to render our business model fit for the future. But we also find that different customers have disparate ideas and wishes. Therefore, we cluster the requirements posed, also incorporating our own input, and implement the issues with the highest number of hits.
So for certain members of a client’s workforce, the format of the future will not be an off-the-rack training with content from which they will later need only a small fraction, but increasingly a fit-for-purpose framework for making relevant information available to precisely the person who needs it at precisely the right moment. Andreas MüllerDirector of the Krones Academy