What is employee development?
In its organisational context it is a process to help people acquire and maintain the competence and commitment that will:
- Improve performance, quality, customer service and long-term organisational progress.
- Aid recruitment and retention, stimulate and support continuous individual development.
- Help to enhance the skill and knowledge base of the organisation and of individuals.
Developing people is therefore a critical process whose most powerful contributions to the business are to do with productivity, performance, knowledge development and organisational progress. Its greatest benefits for individuals are to do with personal competence, growth, adaptability and continuous employability.
Employee development in a strategic framework.
There are different sets of factors that significantly determine the extent to which the employee development process can become of strategic value to an organisation: The measures of performance that dominate the business and the values of the main stakeholders.
Measure of performance
Financial performance: These measure has to do with the current profitability and the state of the end-of-year balance sheet. Incorporates measure of labour productivity and of real profits per employee.
Strategic performance: this measure has to do with taking a longer-term perspective, with growth of a share in existing businesses and with the future positioning of the business.
Organisational effectiveness: It is related to the quality of products and employees, levels of employee morale, the quality of life in the workplace, and the organisations fulfillment of its external social responsibilities.
Values of the main stakeholders.
If top management and other powerful internal and external stakeholders are unaware or unconvinced of the role that employee development is important in adding value, then they will not agree to an investment in it, regardless of the performance measures by favour.
As Kenney J et al, (1979) stated “training is defined as helping an individual to learn how to carry out satisfactorily the work required of him in the present job.”
There are two kinds of training.
Unsystematic Training.
The training boards have done much to extend the use of successful training practices, but many companies still provide minimum training requirements, with the following features:
- It is not an important part of the company’s operations, it has a low priority and employees are largely responsible for their own training.
- More attention may be paid to the presentation of documentation and written programmes than to the actual training management.
By keeping those features in the organisation, they will create longer learning times, faulty work, poor utilization of machinery, damage of equipment and possibly lack of applicants capable of being trained.
Systematic Training
Systematic training is an important ingredient in a company’s manpower strategy. It can be defined as the process of:
- Identifying what training is needed
- Planning appropriate training programmes to meet this need.
- Implementing the training and ensuring that employees are assisted to acquire the skills and knowledge they need.
- Evaluating the effectiveness of the particular training programme and satisfying any residual requirements.
By identifying what training is needed the training officer carries out a training analysis of the work to find out precisely what the new staff will be expected to do, and identify those parts of the job which they are likely to find difficult to learn and where errors are costly. This shows the performance standards to which the new staff must be trained and so provides the objectives for the training programme.
Having identified what training requires, the programme specifies the skills and knowledge required, the time table of the training sessions who will be responsible and where the training will take place.
The third step has to do with how the training is implemented. Following the planning of the training programme, the training is then carried out with adjustments being made where necessary to suit the learning rates of individuals.
Finally, the programme is reviewed at intervals and on completion by the training officer. In this stage experience is used to improve the efficiency of training in the company.
Benefits of training:
- Training helps employees to learn their jobs quickly and effectively. I t also helps to minimize the costs incurred by employees while learning their jobs.
- Existing employees can be helped by training to improve their work performance and to keep up to date in their specialist fields.
- Training increases staff versatility by widening their range of expertise to include related jobs.
Summarizing all the above, we can see that training is as important as employee development for the best operation and performance of the organisation.
Bibliography
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Kenney J, Donnelly E, Reid M, Manpower training and development, 2nd Ed, 1979, Institute of Personnel Management,
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Boydell T, Leary M, Identifying Training Needs, 1996, Institute of Personnel Management.
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Harrison R, Employee Development, 2nd Ed, 2000, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
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George A, Train and Develop Your Staff, 1997, Gower Publishing Limited.