Chapter 8

Training and Developing a Competitive Workforce
Strategic importance of training and development

Improving recruitment and retention

Improving competitiveness

Implementing new technology

Improving customer service: understanding customer needs, training for customers

Knowledge management and learning organizations

Community-of-practice: a social network of people who share a common interest and who are committed to collaborating on projects related to their shared interest. Example: at HP labs, they have “Chalk Talks”, which took place on Friday afternoons where people talked about their projects.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Training, development, and socialization

training has as its main objective improving performance in the near term and in a specific job by increasing employees’ competencies.

development refers to activities intended to improve competencies over a longer period of time in anticipation of the organization’s future needs.

Socialization has the major objective of teaching employees about the organization’s history, culture, and management practices. Also called “onboarding”

Links to other HR activities: 1) legal compliance (OSHA, FDA, FAA), 2) job analysis, competency modeling, and HR planning, 3) recruitment and selecting (Disney begins socialization process during interviews to see if candidate fits).

The HR Triad:

Managers: provide financial resources and time needed for training. In addition, they can improve the effectiveness of the training by participating as trainers, coaches, and mentors.

Employees: training requires cooperation of employees to be effective.

HR professionals: heavily involved in the design of training and development system and the delivery of formal training programs.

Determining training and development needs

Organizational needs analysis: begins with an assessment of the short and long-term strategy and strategic business objectives of the company. This assesses goals, the climate for training, and the resources and constraints.

Job needs analysis: identifies the specific skills, knowledge, and behavior needed to perform the tasks required by present or future jobs. See chapter 5 for job analysis, which provides info for jobs-needs analysis.

Person needs analysis: identifies gaps between a person’s current competencies and those identified as necessary or desirable. Can be broad or narrow in scope.

Person needs analysis accomplished by 1) output measures, 2) self-assessed training needs, 3) career planning discussions, 4) attitude surveys.

Demographic needs analysis: objective is to determine the training needs of specific populations of workers. Could also be used to assess whether or not all employees have equal access to growth.

Conditions for effective training and development

Create the right conditions: 1) insight, 2) motivation, 3) new skills and knowledge acquisition, 4) real-world practice, 5) accountability.

Decide who provides: supervisors/managers, coworker, internal or external expert, or the employee themselves.

Stating the learning objectives

Cognitive knowledge

Company policies and practices

Basic knowledge and the 3 R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic)

The big picture

Skills: technical, interpersonal, language

Choosing the program format: e-learning, on the job (OTJ), apprenticeships, internships, and assistantships, job experiences, supervisory assistance and mentoring, coaching.

Job rotation program: involves rotating employees through jobs at a similar level of difficulty to train them in a variety of jobs and decision making situations.

Developmental job assignments: assignments that place employees in jobs that present difficult new challenges and hurdles.

Off-site training: formal courses, simulations, assessment centers, business board games, wilderness trips and outdoor training, cooking events.

Maximizing learning

Clear instructions

Behavioral modeling: involves describing the behaviors to be learned to trainees, having a role model provide a visual demonstration of the desired behavior, allowing the trainees to imitate the desired behaviors, and giving feedback.

Increasing learning during training: active participation, mastery, feedback, practice.

Maintaining performance after training: specific goals, reinforcers, self-reinforcement.

Training for team leaders: supporting disagreement, managing meetings, etc

Current issues:

Diversity training for employees in the US: cultural awareness training, building competencies (role playing), supplemental diversity training.

Global leadership training and development

Positive characteristics in all cultures: integrity, visionary, inspirational, team builder

Negative characteristics in all cultures: self-protective, malevolent, autocratic.

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