Working area Human Captial Agenda: business sector, government and education

Critical success factor

Having sufficient staff and well-educated employees is crucial in order to achieve the ambitions of the Top Sector Agri & Food. In order to keep and increase human capital, the Human Capital Agenda (HCA) has been established.  The main goal of the HCA is improving the link between education and the private sector for the Top Sector Agri & Food and furthermore to increase the attraction of the sector for employees.

A permanent investment in the power of green education is crucial for the Top Sectors Agri & Food and Horticulture & Starting Materials. The business sector, education and government have started a collaboration in “Development Agenda Green Education 2016 – 2025”. The Human Capital Agenda Agri & Food is part of this development agenda.

Implementation

The execution and implementation of the HCA has been done through various projects and programmes. The business and education sectors implement educational innovation through the Centre for Innovative Expertise Agri & Food and the Centres of Expertise Food, Open Cultivation, Agro Animal and Biobased Economy.

Besides the above centres, the food industry, along with representatives from regional educational institutions, has formulated the vision “Learning and working, working and learning” about what needs to be done to develop an efficient professional training programme. Sustainable deployment of staff – life-long learning – is the main goal; important tools are improving the quality and increasing the number of students from professional training programmes, developing continuous learning curves and using knowledge in regional knowledge bases. This is implemented by the Institute of Education and Development Fund Food Industry.

The further rollout of the HCA will be carried out in the action programmes of the Development Agenda Green Education.

Overall Human Capital Roadmap

There are many overarching themes when it comes to attracting and educating talented employees. Because of this, a cooperation, initiated by the figure heads from the top sectors together with VNO-NCW, was started in May 2015. This has resulted in the overall Human Capital Roadmap (2016). This roadmap is a leverage for other parties (private and public) to go into the same direction. In this way, top sectors cooperate to fulfil their mission.