Experiential education as a part of human development in Czech Republic business companies

Abstract

For business companies, employees are undoubtedly one of the most important sources of competitive advantage. Due to the fact, that these companies understand much more how important knowledge, skills and quality of their people are, the importance of their systematic and efficient education and development is growing too. If it is well prepared, experiential education brings very efficient way to develop human resources. According to the results of David Kolb's research, participants could recall six times more information gained by communication, illustration and experience comparing to information gained only by communication and two times more information comparing to information gained by combination of communication and illustration. This efficiency is achieved primarily by direct involvement of participants in education process and by their own activity. Experience of the participant, developed from solving tasks and problems, is after finishing the activity analysed by targeted feedback supervised by lector. Main aim of this targeted feedback is to evaluate and generalize the gained experience to a form of practically usable knowledge. Very high costs are a disadvantage of this very efficient education. Sometimes it is also very difficult for companies to define main goal of the program - what leads to vacuous use of experiential methods for amusing events - as rewards for employees and managers. The main aim of this paper is to refer about results of quantitative questionnaire research among Czech business companies from year 2011. This research is aimed at the range of experiential education in these companies. It also tries to find the answers to questions about purposes for which experiential education is used in them and what reasons lead them to use or not use it. Within this research framework, this paper shall identify specifics of Czech experiential education. It is very different from similar programs offered abroad. Lots of years, Czech Republic develops separately without any foreign influence and with specific nature conditions, which don't allow difficult expeditions in wild nature. But it starts formation of an unusual approach to experiential education. It is known as Czech Way now and it is a subject of interest for a lot of experiential education companies all over the world.