Employee Development Lecture 4

1. Employee Development Lecture 4 • Approaches To Training Designs: Organisations Learning Systems, Generalized Approaches, Planned Training Interventions, Cost and Benefits of Training Interventions • Key Issues 1) Should Training Benefit People or the Organisation or Both 2) Should Training be Planned for Individuals or Larger Groups 3) Should Decisions on how to Learn be Left to the Learners 4) How Important are Learning Outcomes 5) Should Orhanisations/The Government Spend more on Training

2. Employee Development • Organisations Learning Systems: Managing Employee Development in the real world invariably requires more than a good philosophy of learning and/or a set of learning principles. The essentials of day-to-day management are purpose and choice; decision must be taken on matters as who will learn, what the learning objectives should be, how the plans will be drafted and implemented, the duration of the learning and so on. • The Learner or the Organisation: There are a number of different approaches corresponding to different mixes of two variables. The first variable has been described by Shrivastava (1983) as the ‘Individual-Organisational Dimension’: learning activity is seen as being for the good of either the organisation (or-in the case of a mix of the two-reflecting an emphasis towards on of them).

3. Employee Development • Individual Learning: Is seen as accepting personal developments as the only planned aim; ‘organisational’ is seen as fitting individual learning to coordinated pattern which would also serve the organisation’s work needs. Examples of each are not difficult to find; imagine first a company where the only planned training involves the sending of employees on external courses, and compare this with one where departmental training plans are created as part of annual operating plans. • Systematic or Ad Hoc? Shrivastava’s second dimension related to how learning is expected to happen: it is either allowed to evolve in its direction and time, or it is ‘designed’ via a master plan or a set of procedures which ensure that it takes certain forms (or, once again, there is a bias towards on of these two alternatives).

4. Employee Development • Lacks any Conscious Effort to Contrive the Learning Mechanisms that Emerge in any Organisation’, and the latter as ‘formally introducing these mechanisms to serve stated learning and or information needs identified by managers’ • The distinction is easy to appreciate: compare and organisation with a policy of placing people in jobs for, say, fixed twelve-month periods, but without any formal training inputs, with another which automatically arranges attendance at an external business school courses for each person newly promoted to junior management grade. • In recent years organisations with substantial training activities have been adjusting their learning systems in two ways: 1) They have been increasing the planning, and decreasing the evolutionary emphasis

5. Employee Development 2)They have put organisational learning in front of individual development, whilst trying to achieve both • Other Variables • Many practising training professionals see the two parameters mentioned above as incomplete descriptors of what characterises any given organisation’s approach to learning and hence its learning system. They suggest a large number of equally important variables as follows: 1) The Learners Themselves 2) Training Methods 3) The size of the Learning Unit 4) Training Resources

6. Employee Development 5) Lead Times 6) Status and Power 7) Operational Purposes Generalised Approaches • The ‘Sitting by Nellie’, or ‘Learning by Exposure’ Approach • The Educational Approach • The Problem Centered Approach • The ‘Action Learning’ Approach • The Systems Approach • The ‘Analytical’ Approach

7. Employee Development • The ‘Competences’ Approach • The ‘Training Process’ or ‘Procedural Approach THE TRAINING PROCESS 1) A Stimulus 2) A Pre-Planned Stage 3) A Planning Stage 4) An Implementation Phase 5) A Monitoring/Review Process 6) A Post-Learning Evaluation

8. Employee Development • The Costs and Benefits of Training Interventions BENEFITS • Training helps recruits to learn their jobs more quickly • Established staff need training to keep up to date in a changing world, and at times to improve their performance • Trained and Retrained staff are unlikely to make as many errors as untrained staff, and can eliminate the costs of correcting errors • Training can help to minimise labour turnover in times when labour is scarce ad ‘poaching’ rife • An Organisation with a reputation for good training attracts recruits

9. Organisational Development • Regular training in safe working practices reduces accidents, which are costly in both financial and morale terms • Training can Significantly stimulate the creation of a versatile workforce, that is one in which workers can effectively carry any of several jobs, and hence provide a flexible resource Training Costs • ‘People’ Costs, Wages/Salaries, Fees (Training Providers, Assessors) • ‘Equipment’ Costs • ‘Admin’ Costs • ‘Materials’ Costs Summary & Conclusions