In many organisations and companies training and learning offers do not fit to personal, situational and business needs. Often trainings and courses are offered too late for changes in business processes or they are not aligned with the needs of the employees. From this it follows that the planning and executing of learning processes is not connected with the business processes and business information systems. In consequence such training offers have a lack of acceptance because they are not enabling the employees to fulfil their tasks in the business process. Today learning design and business process management are often "loose connected worlds". If processes are changed, organisations take care of IT requirements but they do not consider that learning and training is a key enabler for the knowledge transfer to their "human capital". Training is an investment as important as, e.g., a new IT infrastructure.Fortunately, information and communication technologies are not only the cause for qualification and training needs but also support it. In future people and organisations will be more competitive by reducing the time to fill competency gaps and to build skills according to the business needs and the daily work processes. The time gap between identification of a learning need and the appropriate training should become smaller.

The international Professional Training Facts 2006 conference will demonstrate how information and communication technologies are already used for professional training and give foresights and forecasts for upcoming IT solutions in this area.

The conference will focus on the issue of requirements, challenges, solutions, and experiences in the area of professional training. Speakers from companies as well as from research institutes and universities will show ideas shaping this field today and in future. Special themes of the conference will be: company requirements and challenges in professional training; upcoming ICT solutions for education; process-oriented learning and information exchange with the focus on embedding training into business and work processes; and more.

The main conference language is English, but to attract also national participants there are also two tracks in German language. Target groups of the conference are companies, intermediary organizations, providers of solutions in professional learning, (applied) research institutes. 

For more information and registration, please see attached flyer and visit the conference website.

Contact: Alexander Karapidis, Fraunhofer IAO Stuttgart 
(alexander.karapidis@iao.fhg.de)