There is a lot of competition in the adult education system, in which there were more than 600 institutions at the time of applying. That is why there are situations where the bidder offering the lowest price is selected during public procurement tenders. The lowest price usually does not mean the highest quality. POU Koprivnica, as an institution with many years of excellent results, constantly invests in education of its employees and carefully selects external experts in order to provide the best quality education and thus compete in the market. For this purpose, at that moment, the need for training employees in the field of working with people with special educational needs was identified. Due to good results until then, the demand for new educations continued and work on employee's development is essential. We also wanted to see how LU Jesenice achieves such excellent results and what is the secret of their success. We hoped to gain some new knowledge and acquire some new skills by following the work of their employees. We would observe and study their methodology and way of working and try to adapt it to our conditions and apply it in our institution, with the aim of successfully swimming among the competition.
In last few years, POU Koprivnica implements programs for people with special educational needs. These are associations of people with disabilities and/or intellectual disabilities. We also implement training for teaching assistants in working with students with difficulties, as well as training for professional communication mediators in teaching. Being a very vulnerable target group, it requires special skills of the lecturer and adaptation of the teaching to the capabilities of participants. With help of external experts and selected lecturers with greater sensitivity and experience in working with people from this target group, all educations were done well. But, it is always possible to do better. That is why 2 people were sent to a structured course for working with people with special educational needs. Job shadowing was chosen because of great competition among adult education institutions and consequently problems with forming groups of participants because there are not enough of them to be profitable. Therefore, LU Jesenice, as a very successful institution in implementation of programs, agreed to host two our employees so they would through monitoring acquire new skills and knowledge that they will apply in their work.