Management of Training and Development

Training and Development of Employees have always been a top priority for organizations throughout the world for a long time. Organizations realize that the employees forming the human capital of the organization are their real assets. It is the human capital that uses its intellect, intelligence, skills, and entrepreneurship to take the organization to the heights it wants to achieve. Keeping this in mind, the Training and Development function which used to be taken care of by the Human Resource Department only has now assumed strategic dimensions. The Senior Management fully realizes the potential of the Training and development activities in creating a competitive advantage for the firm in a highly uncertain business environment that is prevalent these days all over the world.

As such, training has become very strategic in the sense that organizations attempt to align the training and development activities with the business strategy of the organization. Any training or learning activity that does not align with the business strategy of the company is simply redundant and is of no use to the organization. Similarly, the employees after the training program is over are required to transfer the skills they have learned during the training program to their organizational routine tasks. If they are unable to do that, again the training would prove to be redundant. However, the transfer of training is very much dependent on the workplace environment and whether the atmosphere in the company as well as the facilities allow the training to be transferred when the trainees are fully willing to do so. In the case of inadequate facilities or a lack of managerial or peer support, transfer of training becomes very difficult to achieve thereby negating the very purpose of the training program.

The effectiveness of the training program is measured by looking and examining the learning outcomes. A proper evaluation of the training would include provisions to measure these outcomes and the better the measurement capability, the better the organization would be able to ascertain its effectiveness. Learning outcomes could be related to increasing in sales or productivity, etc. It is also extremely important for the organization to know which learning delivery methods are best suited for its employees. There are many traditional methods that are used the world over and have been in use for a long time but the organizations should try out the newer and modern methods like adaptive learning and social learning, etc. Adaptive learning is employee specific and the power of social learning is being increasingly acknowledged by experts all over the world. With such powerful tools available these days, one can look forward to an era where besides these modern methods, virtual reality and augmented reality would also be used extensively all over the world as their costs would decrease with the advancement of technology over time.