Introduction
Firms Objective should be able to focus on how their employee will improve their Knowledge and skills in order to have high increase productivity, sustained competitive improvement. "Training" refers to a systematic approach to learning and development to improve individual, team, and organizational effectiveness (Goldstein & Ford 2002). "Development" refers to activities leading to the acquisition of new knowledge or skills for purpose of personal growth. The different between training and development may be that training could be on the job training while development could be on going or regular event. Though, it is often difficult to ascertain whether a specific research study addresses training and development separately. For further discussion of this essay, reader should bear in mind that the term "training" will also refer to training and development.
Patton et al, 2000 argue that successful training program has lead government in many countries to invest more on training program as to encourage organization and employee. This was done to increase the skills and knowledge of the employee and also to encourage organization to invest in training and development. However, Human Resource Development scholars and practitioners try to develop and design successful programmes for practicing oraganisation and individuals, who desire to increase engagement in training and development activities. These activities either start from skills and knowledge based workshops to long term credit programmes. Despite all their interest in such programmes, there are quite a lot of factors that might slow down or hinder organization to invest in training and development, it may be ranging from costs and time pressures as identify by (Mabey and Thomson, 2000). Research shows that both studies still have doubt about the tangible benefits of training and development can yield either at a short-run or long run (Thomson et al, 2001). The consideration of these highlighted challenges and barriers of training and development might make organization not want to invest in training and development. Organization and individual may have negative or positive view to invest in training and development. Organization with a negative view, view training as a great; this stem from the fact that firms have problems which are not intended to be addressed by the instructional program or training and they make believe that training and development cannot provide any measurable benefits to the firm or the cost of investing in training is discouraging as identify by (Mabey and Thomson, 2000).
However, firm that has positive view, they may also base their perception on some author who lamented that training should not be consider as a luxury to be embark on when time and financial plans allow. Nor is it wise to think of training and development as a matter of detecting weak employees or fixing problems. Training and development is needed for both present and future jobs. In well planned organization, training and development department act not only as a department of physicians that minister to firms problems, but as an agent of change and solution. So organization should be able to recognize that the training function has positive and valuable intention about the core skills of employees. Training and development department in a successful organization understands the firm strategic direction and can plan and implement a creative way of moving employee in the right direction.
In contracting the positive view and negative view of training and development shows that organizations do not want to take risk investing in training. Research has shown that it will be difficult for organization who doesn't want to invest in training and development to provide appropriate solution to the following problems which are among the key success of organizational objective. Firstly, challenges face in the customer services, if organization does not have a good quality customer services to be able to satisfy the customers and the employee who deal with customers does not know how to relate to customers properly and employee can't even suggest best kind of services for customers, that means the company can lose in the competitors market. Due to reluctance to invest in training, some organization's customer satisfaction has significantly decreased (O'Shea, 2007); he also carried out a research and finds that the complaints filed with the association of German banks has relatively increase from 1510 in 1993 to 4136 in 2006. Individual may not be comfortable any time they are trained that the "customer is always right" Even as many face the situation were the customer is wrong (Stauss and Seidel, 2005). Secondly, lunching new product or technology will require specialist training and development for individual so that they can understand how to carry out the organizational objective. The training type will be determined by the type of product to be lunched. For instance, in a surgical department, non-invasive surgical techniques required different methods of operating in the open surgery, this shows that training is a necessity because you have to train surgeons to be able to make use of the new technology. This identification requires the development of essential reality simulators for training and development surgeons. In this situation new technology can be harmful, if it is not use properly by the individuals who are not well trained. Appropriate training is the key solution to ensure save technology usage or lunching a new product in an organization.
Organizations that appropriately invest in training their employees enjoy many benefits. Same apply to the employee as well too. The benefits of training and development to organization, employees play a critical role in the success of organizational objective.
Training and development benefit to the organization.
Training and development can make easy the following in an organization. Customer's satisfaction, strategy, improves employee retention and recruitment, increase effectiveness, reduce machine down time and waste.
Customer satisfaction, this is one of the key to organizational success. By training employees to no more about their product, promoting good customer relation will lead to increase customer satisfaction and high quality services to be render.
Strategy, organizational goal and objective are to survive and prosper in the competitive market. Organizations can be successful by training and develop employees so they have the required skills and proper knowledge to achieve the organizational goal.
Improve retention and recruitment, training and development can be use as an effective tool for motivating and retaining top talent or experts, particularly for those employees under the age of 32 who have the perception of professional development and career growth more essential than their salary.
Increase effectiveness, most organization believe that there is no calculable benefits to training and development of employee. Employee who are trained are significantly different because they required less managerial supervision, make fewer errors, do better at work, have more positive attitudes, and have a lower rates of attrition. Employees that are trained also produce higher quality products and services for the benefits of the organization. All these benefits identify have a positive effect to an organizations competiveness and effectiveness.
Reduce machine down time and production waste, Training and development increases productivity of employee and processes. The employee can gain benefits beyond just the skills and knowledge they learn from the course of training, salary increase, job security and promotions may all be benefits of obtaining and applying new knowledge.
Training and development benefits to employee
Training and development also has benefits to employees. The benefits to employees can be identified as those that are internal to an employee, such as attitudes, skills, knowledge and those that are external to an employee.
The internal benefits of training and development
Employee that is trained, benefits from training and development by acquiring new skills and knowledge which enable them to perform better on their task. Research has shown that training and development of an employee has a positive impact on the employee's performance and job behavior. However to improve employee knowledge and skills, trained employee must have also develop a greater self - efficacy and confidence in performing their job. Training and development motivate employee work level of knowledge and skills. It provides sense of satisfaction, which refer to intrinsic motivator, Investing in training and development could bring a positive changes to job performance and other positive changes such as acquisition of new skills which was cited by (Hill and Lent 2006) and (Satterfield and Hughes, 2007). Training and development serve as an antecedent of job performance in the organization (Kraiger 2002). Arthur et al. (2003) research that the high benefits of training will depend on the training delivery method and the skill and knowledge or task being trained and developed on.
The external benefit of training and development employee
External benefits in training and development include higher earnings as a result of increased skills and knowledge, greater security of employment, improved marketability and enhanced opportunities for advancement and promotion.
By implementing an adequate training program, employee morale and confidence goes up, worker turnovers are totally reduced significantly, job or task satisfaction increases, and builds a service oriented workforce that is take a quick responds to the needs of the customers. And also make them attracted to the competitors company.
Barriers to training and development in an organization and to individuals
Identifying many benefits of training and development to the organization and individuals it is surprising that some organizations and individual do not want to invest in training and development, and it begs the question, "Why don't organizations and individuals to invest in training and development?"
Organizations should have a successful program to note the barriers to effective training. Training and development of a liable employee is critical to the growth and productivity of an organization. This is because well trained employees become valuable assets to the organization as they perform with excellence and efficiency.
An investigation carried out by (Mabey and Thomson, 2000) echoed the observations of (Sambrook and Stewart, 2000) in that, environmental problems, which include costs related to management training and time pressures as the main problems to invest in training and development. In further study of (Thomson et al, 2001) also identify similar things on environmental problems such as concerns for costs, perception of the quality of the training and development programs, time and organization were not able to identify any tangible benefits that training and development activities can result to. As a result (Thomson et al, 2001) further discussed that managers can be exceptionally instrumentalist, in doing their work with regard to undertaking management development activities; that is to say, they are often pre-occupied with the "exchange" value of qualifications rather than their actual "use" to the firm or organization.
Stress more on Mabey et al, 2002 where they identify that the major problems of why organization feels reluctant to training and development is cost. This is not accepted by some other authors such as (Storey and Westhead 1997) where they reveals that the majority of research studies only examines the impact of training and development on organization using a limited variable or dependent or categorical measures. However this is concern on whether a particular type of training and development or no training has taken place and on whether a particular group of managers or employee involved.
Identifying training and development costs question is also essential in terms of the econometric methodology. For instance, in the CBR SME dataset the training and development costs variable has a probability distribution with a number of mass points. Most times we only observe training costs conditional upon the decision to undertake some form of training.
After reviewing the problem on why firm and employee feel reluctant to training as highlighted in the previously referenced scholars, McCracken, 2004 conducted a qualitative research of problems to training participation for mid-career managers. Eventually, factors that facilitated or delay organization from taking part in training and development were highlighted and a model was developed. The model included built upon, many of the intrinsic factor and extrinsic factor or industry oriented factors discussed previously by (Stuart, 1984, p. 195) who a significant contribution to training and development where he logically assembly the reason why organization and employee feel reluctant to invest in training in two dimension. First, intrinsic factors, which he explained as, problems which occur due to employer and employee attitude, perception, believe and experience. Second the extrinsic factor, he explained as factors present as outcome of influences from the organization in which employee's work. He further explain the extrinsic factors in two ways, the physical-structural barriers ". . . where the trainee experiences blocks and barriers to his training which are rooted in his tasks, the structure within which they are located, and the physical setting in which they are carried out"; and psycho-social constraints that "…arise from the prevailing climate and relationships of which trainee is a part…" Reader should bear in mind that, the implicit grouping of participation barriers into intrinsic and extrinsic factors has become a standard feature in this essay.
McCracken, 2004 further elaborated the intrinsic or the individual oriented factors which include the following, desire to participate in training or motivation to participate in training; emotional, including insecurity and fear of failure; perceptual, or the perceived value of training; Cognitive, or extent to which past training and development experiences affect the current or feature training activities while The extrinsic factor or organization model include the following, work life pressures such as location of the training program, time and physical pressure, and specifically views concerning development opportunities, access or management development culture and support for training; and the trainee's overall perception of the firms environment or firms culture. As one of the current contributors to participation in training field, McCracken's model was used to ground the participation factors presented in the conceptual model shown in this essay.
Sambrook and Stewart (2000) also highlighted the important of understanding trainee's perceptions of their work environment and how it can affect participation in training and development. Their research of managers identify different cultural characteristics at the organizational level can make firm's and employee not to participate in training and development. They quoted a world called "turfism" meaning that some managers are territorial. That is there is bureaucracy, lack of time available for training due to workload, fear change and increased workplace pressure. Both identify all that as the problem why firms and employee fee reluctant to training and development. However they identify the influence of reference others for example peer and senior managers, whose support was found to affect an employee's interest. Interestingly, both work highlighted the role of stakeholder, trade unions which was not discussed in other study.
Conclusion
