New Trends in Training and Development: A Model Essay

New Trends in Training and Development: A Model Essay

The main reasons for the rapidly growing demand for training and development are for self-enrichment and survival in response to the chaos of the current workplace. Employees are realizing that the knowledge and skills they acquired in college are becoming obsolete, and they need to constantly stay flexible, marketable, and competitive. Japanese companies are as committed as ever to workers training; and skill development. This will be helpful in combining over all organizational growth along with personal growth, which enabled fulfillment to the individual as well as the organization. Training used to be focused more on enabling an employee to perform his/her current job effectively and efficiently and the evaluation used to be based on whether it contributes to current strategic goals. Wachovia Corporation assesses the impact of training on the business performance of the company through meeting the expectations of the top management; development of evaluation strategy and data collection plans, improvement of work performance. The New Zealand's Advertising Guru states, "The single biggest waste of training dollars is when management spends money on training but doesn't understand why." He further quotes that "Investing in skills isn't something enterprises should do because someone tells them to, but because it's central to their future success."

In the modern era as globalization and competition increase training systems have to change focus. With the knowledge economy enveloping the world, the traditional hierarchical organizational structures are giving way to flatter and flexible organizational structures. Work pressures are on the increase due to the increasing stresses and strains. Organizations now work with flexible teams and an employee is a member of different teams simultaneously. Employees expectations in terms of responsibility as well as rewards have changed dramatically. Rewards come when the organizations starts identifying the relationship between the training and bottom line performance. To prove this, the American Society For Training and Development Study reveals that 25% of the companies invested in training got back 24% of the higher profit margins, 50% enjoyed the Total Shareholder Return i.e. 86% higher than bottom half. When the company's spent $680 per employee to get suitable training fetched 6% increase in Total Shareholders Return.

Positions of higher responsibilities call for a different attitudinal perspective and hence methodologies have to be developed which build this attitudinal perspective. In the fast changing world such a process will strengthen the organization further and makes the organization competitive. For example, in India, Infosys is imparting leadership training by setting up a training institute for future leader. From a policy, which began from an assessment of current, needs of the organization it will now have to encompass even emerging needs of organization. Suitable training calendars will have to be developed to cover both these aspects as well as impart skill as well as attitudinal training. Training needs analysis done to identify training gaps will also undergo suitable changes. The most critical area where top management will have to play major role will be in terms of suitable budgetary allocations for capability enhancement of people within the organizations. Training records will have to be