www.mpm.org.tr

www.rkw.de

www.swspiz.pl

www.imm.ro

www.slcp.sk

www.etu.edu.tr  

www.tobb.org.tr

Competitiveness through Productivity

A widely accepted definition of competitiveness is the ability of an economy to provide its population with high and rising standards of living and a high level of employment for all those willing to work on a sustainable basis. The central ingredient of competitiveness is productivity growth. Since the mid 1990s the average growth rates of real GDP, labour productivity and total factor productivity in the European Union have fallen behind those in the United States. The recent slowdown in productivity growth in the EU is synonymous with deteriorating competitiveness. Besides, there is a wide variation across the European Union in productivity performance, both in terms of growth rates as well as levels. A limited number of countries show productivity levels near to that of the US (Germany, Netherlands) or even above it (Belgium, France), whereas others are substantially behind. However, nearly all countries show a recent erosion of their average productivity levels relative to the US.

What makes these evaluations more critical is that efforts for productivity in Europe have concentrated on the wrong area and timescale. It is now widely accepted that productivity studies should be focused on basic education and training, for the acquisition of key competences while maintaining similar emphasis on lifelong learning.

Training and Productivity

Empirical studies show positive and strong relation between training density and productivity of enterprises.

Training can effectively influence productivity – and hence competitiveness and the achievement of the Lisbon objectives - to the extent that it is part of a wider and general framework of education policy.

An Alternative Approach: Productivity Training

Since work-related training positively and significantly affects productivity, a training programme solely on productivity would be much more effective.

Besides training on the job, training people solely on productivity who will assist in solving basic productivity related problems of enterprises must be conceived to be another effective way on solving this problem.

For a higher impact, a training program on productivity for Europe is needed.

Training people that will form a bridge or interface between enterprises and the institutions offering productivity services when problems are of larger magnitude and complicated will raise the efficiency of such efforts on productivity.

To achieve this goal, developing a productivity training curriculum for Europe will be the initial step.

Project: Euroductivity

Euroductivity project brings universities (TOBB-ETU, SWSPIZ), productivity centres (MPM, RKW, SLCP ) an SME Center (CRIMM) and a business front organization (TOBB) together with a global aim of increasing the competitiveness and productivity level of Europe. In order to reach this global aim, a productivity training curriculum intended for the senior students and newly graduates from the faculties of engineering and economics & administrative sciences will be designed, selected portions of this curriculum content material will be developed and finally some of this material will be delivered in e-learning environment.

Partnership

A Sound Partnership for a Sound Project

Project partnership is profoundly sound with its unique composition including MPM (National Productivity Centre of Türkiye), RKW (Centre for Productivity and Innovation), SWSPIS (The Academy of Management, Lodz/ Polanya), CRIMM ( Foundation Romanian Centre for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises), SLCP (Slovak Productivity Centre) and TOBB Economics and Technology University. TOBB (The Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey) is the honorary partner of this project.

Roles

Participating in Euroductivity Leonardo da Vinci pilot project fits into the missions of the partners which are productivity centres of their countries; as RKW, SLCP and MPM’s work programmes are mainly designed to foster productivity and disseminate knowledge on basic productivity concepts, productivity management tools and productivity measurement models. The SWSPIZ and TOBB ETU brings academic support in order to prepare a productivity training programme with a curriculum practicable throughout Europe, profitable for all sectors of manufacturing industry and valid for long run. SLCP also provides academic contribution with the backing of Zilina University. CRIMM will take part in the elaboration of the course content. CRIMM and SLCP will contribute to the project process with their extensive experience in project management under various programmes funded by the European Commission, the World Bank or bilateral funding bodies.

To sum up the partners main roles at a glance; MPM, TOBB, RKW, SLCP, CRIMM are the main actors which will provide the dissemination and exploitation of the project. SWSPIZ and TOBB-ETU are the academic partners of the project which will support the pilot implementations.

Outputs

The main output of this project is the productivity curriculum. It is envisaged that the target group, senior students and newly graduates from the faculties of engineering and economics & administrative sciences, will be trained with the outputs of our project. Trained people are expected to assist in solving minor problems of the enterprises they are employed and detect any major problem immediately. For major problems they will act as an interface between productivity centres (i.e. any institution that offers productivity services) and enterprises.

5 e-courses selected from the curriculum will be developed. Developed online course material will be tested with persons from the actual target group population. For testing the results of training programme, pilot studies will be carried out in Turkiye and Poland . In order to evaluate the performance of learners, the knowledge level of the participants before and after the pilot study will be measured by conducting a pre-test and post-test, which will aim to measure the learning results.

To provide the dissemination and exploitation of the project, a web-site is to be built in English, Turkish, German, Polish, Romanian and Slovak languages.