Increasing Productivity

For the purpose of our discussion productivity is the value of the products and or services being produced by a person. When things work as they should the value a person creates is tied to the amount of money they earn, further the more value (money/capital) which is created the more money there will be to hire additional people, and the more money will be spent to create additional jobs.

Improving Productivity is one of the single most important parts of creating jobs and increasing wages. 

I would argue that in the United States education and training are the best way's to improve productivity as these each help to improve worker performance as well as technology as more knowledgeable people demand and create better technology. Along with education improved technology, efficiency, better leadership, and infrastructure all play their part in improving productivity.

Improving productivity is especially important in the United States where demand currently exceeds productivity by hundreds of billions of dollars a year. 

Education as a means of Increasing Productivity
One of the biggest challenges we face in educating people to find work and earn more money is that many of the jobs which are available didn't exist when people started college or high school. Further there is a tendency to have more people learn a specific skill then there are job openings for that skill which means that many people won't be able to find jobs.

In order to deal with this problem there needs to be more short term educational options for people which allow them to learn new skills or to improve upon there existing sets of skills cheaply. This can be done through new means such as Education Badges and Moocs (such as those at http://www.mooc.ca/) and other online seminars and training sessions, as economic developers and development organizations we can discover what people need to learn and pull together the resources to help them learn it.
In addition to these newer means of learning there are more traditional methods such as workshops, apprenticeships and consulting.

Education and Business Development
Within the field of economic development there has often been more emphasis placed on fighting other communities for resources rather than developing resources within a community. The problem with business attraction is that it is a zero sum game in which one community will win out over another but it creates nothing. The advantage to business attraction is that allows a community to gain a known entity, and brings additional brain power into a community. However, by helping the people within a community learn the skills they need to start and or improve their businesses we provide the people we serve with new opportunities while creating money which wouldn't have existed without these opportunities. Creating new value also means that nearly all communities can improve, and is a great option for those communities which will have difficulty attracting new businesses.

When developing educational opportunities for business owners one must keep in mind that they will learn more from a series of workshops than from a single workshop and will learn more from consulting than from workshops. Unfortunately a series of workshops costs more time and money than a single one and consulting costs more money than workshops.
Technology can be used as a means or reducing the cost of increased knowledge through the creation of online workshops which business owners can review as they have time. Further the business owners can send their questions via email and than these questions and the answers to them can become part of the information included on the workshops site, decreasing the number of questions which need to be answered and increasing the knowledge of all the businesses involved.

Such workshops should not be used to replace direct business consulting when this is possible as consulting provides business with specific ideas and knowledge which they need and allows businesses to keep their secrets private.