ew Brunswick’s reinvention of its workforce offers a model for other local governments, and parts of the strategy could be adapted for the private sector. An example might be a company that is quickly trying to reposition itself in a changing marketplace. New Brunswick’s knowledge and innovation manager, Leonard Weeks, and others offer the following tips on how to change gears:

    • Try a variety of vehicles for delivering training to workers. Not everyone learns in the same way, at the same pace. New Brunswick at various times has utilized video conferencing, online courses, and unstructured Internet surfing as a way to reach different types of individuals with different needs.

    • Look for existing assets that you can leverage as training resources. New Brunswick turned its telephone network into a delivery system for training courses, and converted a modest community college into a world-class center for developing multimedia educational content and courses. Your government agency or company may have assets that can be converted to a new use, at far less than it would cost to create specially designed ones.

    • Combine training with work experience. Even the most skillfully constructed classroom simulations can’t match the insights gained from actually doing a job. At New Brunswick’s Learning Technology Center of Excellence, students reinforce their newly learned skills by immediately putting them to use in creating actual marketable products.

    • Make training broadband. Instead of focusing on a smaller group of the most promising potential candidates for technology jobs, New Brunswick set out to give every worker in the province an opportunity to learn new skills. With Internet-based training courses and other scalable distance-learning tools, it’s possible to do that without significantly increasing your costs. "You never know what a person’s potential is going to be," says Weeks, "until you give them a chance to show it."

    • Shape your training efforts to fit a market niche. New Brunswick officials visited Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s, looking for leads on a new-media market segment that wasn’t already dominated by big players. They identified courseware and training technology as a need that no one had filled, and focused on training their workers to claim that niche.

Workforce, July 2002, p. 48 -- Subscribe Now!