Effectiveness of Employees Training and Development Programmes

Description

Effectiveness of Employees Training and Development Programmes (Final Project Report)

Page Length : 72

Executive Summary

Training and development play an important role in the effectiveness of organizations and to the experiences of people in work. Training has implications for productivity, health and safety at work and personal development. All organizations employing people need to train and develop their staff. Most organizations are cognizant of this requirement and invest effort and other resources in training and development. Such investment can take the form of employing specialist training and development staff and paying salaries to staff undergoing training and development. Investment in training and development entails obtaining and maintaining space and equipment. It also means that operational personnel, employed in the organization’s main business functions, such as production, maintenance, sales, marketing and management support, must also direct their attention and effort from time to time towards supporting training development and delivery. This means they are required to give less attention to activities that are obviously more productive in terms of the organization’s main business.

However, investment in training and development is generally regarded as good management practice to maintain appropriate expertise now and in the future. The relevance of occupational psychology to training and development contributing to training has long been one of the main concerns of occupational psychology – this is not surprising given that training involves learning and that learning is a central issue in psychology. Training is one of the core skills of occupational psychology. People with qualifications in and experience of occupational psychology have been employed in different capacities in training and development roles in government organizations, private companies and consultancy groups. The discipline offers many benefits and perspectives to help resolve training issues and problems and has also been at the root of many methods and techniques that have now become part of the routine practices within human resource management.

Training specialists must be alert to the wider issues regarding the problems presented to them and need the skills and confidence to deal with them. They must understand how training fits into the wider organizational context. An occupational psychology perspective is extremely beneficial in helping the practitioner to understand how training relates to other interventions aimed at improving job performance. Opportunities of employment in training and development Governments have traditionally played a significant role in the promotion and development of occupational psychology with regard to training, because of their responsibilities for employment, military, health and other services. People with an occupational psychology background have been employed directly by governments in areas such as job training, military training and health and safety. Government agencies have also been a major sponsor of training research and development; such investment has often provided the major underpinning of developments in this area.  Governments can also affect the impetus for change in organizations through legislation, taxation, and the general health of the economy, which in turn can create more disposable income to create new demands for products and services, affect the supply of raw materials and services, or put such pressure on consumers that markets are adversely affected. Also, government initiatives can affect health and safety requirements, fiscal issues, competition laws, and ecological concerns, working with new technology and employment practices. Such changes prompt new ways of organizing and delivering these products and services, creating new training needs.

The other major source of employment and funding in training and development, where occupational psychology plays a specialist role, is private companies. Specialists might be employed directly within an organization’s training and development functions or in consultancy offering services to clients. Organizations often employ their own specialist training and development staffs who has been recruited from the organization’s own ranks. Organizations often prefer this approach because they feel it is more appropriate for their training staff to have operational and business experience than for them to be experts in training or occupational psychology. It is often assumed that training is simply a matter of following well-established procedures and principles. This is an ill-informed view because often training cannot always proceed simply by application of standard methods.

It is often necessary to understand variations that have not been responsive to the standard procedures. This entails understanding how people learn and how training can support this learning. Training and development staff are generally responsible for maintaining company training and development systems, to  judge training needs and to organize the delivery of training and development. Practitioners with an occupational psychology background may be encountered in departments concerned with organizational development where they are engaged with the processes of organizational change of which training and development is a part. It is impossible to be more specific than this.

Opportunities for occupational psychology specialists to become engaged in training arise in different contexts and circumstances. It is important to remain alert to where these opportunities might occur and be adaptive and constructive in responding to opportunities. Research into the psychology of training and development there is substantial literature concerned with the psychology of training and development, much of which has emerged from past government and military funding initiatives. Some has been funded from the commercial sector. Applied training and development research is less likely to have been funded by research councils, who tend to focus instead on pure rather than applied science. Research into training generally requires substantial funding and opportunity for access to real situations. Without funding or access, it is difficult for applied psychologists to contribute effectively to this area or for their findings to be accepted as credible. In university research it is possible to set up and run basic laboratory or small-scale studies in human learning and social interaction with minimal resources as a basis for publication and for theory development, but these do not match the complexity that needs to be addressed to resolve practical training issues in a rigorous way. Some comparatively inexpensive laboratory studies in areas of training and instruction have been important in clarifying issues and demonstrating the potential benefits of applying different principles to training. But laboratory studies are limited in this field because research findings may be confined to the laboratory context and not deal effectively with practical issues when the complexities of the real situation are encountered.

This means that there is no wholly reliable body of research to enable training decisions to be made with complete confidence. This may sound like a weakness, but it is a reflection of the fact that new operational contexts can change the applicability of research findings that were obtained in a different operational context.

It also makes for more interesting work, because problems generally have to be investigated, solved and then outcomes tested, rather than simply following a simple recipe. To this end, this learning material will set out the basic ideas involved in the psychology of training and development, so that it becomes clearer how work in this area can be conducted. It will introduce the main concepts and themes, with a view to providing a framework for your later work. In particular, it will present these ideas in the context of organizations, showing how they can be applied and how they might be constrained. The material will not aim to provide a comprehensive account of all aspects of the occupational psychology of training and development. Such issues will be left for you to investigate as future requirements present themselves in your professional career. What we will focus on, however, is providing you with an overview of the main issues in the management and development of training   for which knowledge of occupational psychology can contribute towards helping solve practical problems of training in an effective way.

Content 

• Introduction To The Study
• Statement Of The Problem
• Objectives Of The Study
• Scope Of The Study
• Research Methodology
• Review Of Literature
• Industry Profile
• Company Profile
• Administration And Management
• Findings
• Suggestions
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix