The Strategic Approach to Employee Training and Development

free essayThe intense competition and constant emergence of new challenges force companies to apply the strategic approach to employee training. This brings benefits to both employees and employers.

Strategic Nature of Employee Training and Development

Employee training and development is the process within an organization that involves gaining or transferring knowledge, skills, and abilities required for performing a certain activity or task. Therefore, the advantages of training and development have a strategic nature for employees as well as employers. In particular, employers enhance their possibilities to meet current and future challenges. Training employees to perform their current tasks increases their productivity, which also passively affects the efficiency of the whole company. Knowledge transferring leads to improving customer’s service and expanding business opportunities. Besides, training and development includes career improvement, which is beneficial for employers. Employers also win from this, because career development and expanding job opportunities make a positive work environment. As a result, employees become motivated to work and stay in the company for a long period. A talented employee will be attracted to start working in the company. Appropriate training and development plan assist in focusing on knowledge, skills and abilities that are required for reaching corporate goals as well as building competitive advantage (Niazi, 2011). Overall, training and development have five benefits, such as increased productivity, strengthened morale and decreased supervision, smaller number of accidents, and raised stability and flexibility. These benefits prove that employee training and development have strategic nature (Dwivedi, 2009).

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Criteria for Determining Strategy for HR Training & Development

The major criteria for determining strategy for employee training and development are considering real needs and capabilities of the company (Dwivedi, 2009). In particular, HR specialists should conduct careful evaluation of corporate needs and then determine an appropriate type of training that meets these requirements. Determining skill gaps is also the way for identifying strategy for training and development of employment training and development. This can be performed through analyzing job description and comparing the skills that the job demands with worker’s real abilities. For example, the job description should contain the point about ability to provide customer’s service in English, but employees could have poor knowledge of English. Theretofore, they should be taught to serve customers in English. Eventually, this meets the company’s needs, because including requirement about English language into a written job description means that the company has a goal to attract English-speaking customers. On the other hand, it is necessary to consider financial capabilities of the company. The organization could have many needs, but if budget is limited, it might be useful to determine key needs. To sum up, while determining strategy for employee training and development, it is important to consider the current and future needs of the company as well as its resources that are required for conducting these activities.

Approach to Training in a Small Family-owned Business and in a Multinational Company

The choice of approach to strategic training and development is greatly affected by the size of the company (Dwivedi, 2009). Thus, small family owned business is not really focused on training. Even if they decide to conduct it, they try to spend insignificant budgets on this. Owners try to spend each dollar wisely, because they spend their own money and want to know what they gain for these financial losses. Training in small family-owned business is carefully prepared and addresses the key needs of the company and its employees. It is usually voluntary and is conducted by the other workers or even owners. Small companies can also invite students from colleges that would improve some skills and abilities of employees free of charge. Besides, the company may invite law firms, accounting agencies or other groups for conducting training. Groups usually educate employees for free or for small money. The popular forms for employee training and development are lectures, on-the-job training, and so on. As for multinational companies, they have more time, finances, and human resources, so they have a more serious approach to strategic training. First, they provide more hours of training to their staff. Second, training usually has obligatory character. Finally, such companies have training professionals that apply a significant number of types of training (e.g. simulations, computer-based training, and classes).

Training and Development, Succession Planning and Organization’s Success

Succession planning is a process by which the company assures that employees are hired and professionally taught to fulfill all the important roles in the organization. Using succession planning, the company hires managers, improves their knowledge, skills and abilities, and trains them even for more challenging roles. Effective successive planning serves a guarantee for the company that its employees are always developed and are able to execute all the necessary roles (Rothwell, 2010).This means that the organization can reach high effectiveness of operations and overall success. However, it is important for companies not to ignore succession planning after first successes of the company, because company expansion involves risks. In particular, new roles could appear and the company should have trained employees to fill in them. Apart from that, appropriate succession planning helps the organization to deal with the loss of the most critical workers, staff promotions, and modifying the company’s opportunities (Rothwell, 2010). Therefore, the relationships between training and development, succession planning and organization’s success are very strong. Succession planning includes training and development that is used for preparing employees that could fill in key roles in the organization. Effectively prepared succession planning has a significant effect on the company’s success.

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The Importance of Multicultural Diversity Training

Multicultural diversity is very important for keeping balance within an organization. It is particularly valuable for multinational companies that have operations in various countries. Employees should know about the necessity to respect cultural differences of customers, partners, colleagues, and suppliers. Employers should provide multicultural diversity training to raise understanding and prepare staff for working in a culturally diverse workplace. Overall, such type of training is able to increase the company’s productivity, because all the operations would meet the needs of various sides. For example, French and American employees have various approaches to a boss. French people are more relaxed and tend to refer all the issues to their boss, whereas Americans prefer taking responsibility to decide issues on their own if it is possible (Deb, 2006). Besides, the multicultural diversity training helps the company to avoid legal issues that usually leads to the loss of a significant amount of time and money. The thing is that federal laws as well as legislatures across states prohibit discrimination against employees or customers based on their age, race, religion or disabilities (Deb, 2006). Finally, the world is getting more and more globalized, so it would be beneficial to hire people with different cultural backgrounds. They would be able to understand the needs of a larger number of customers.

Legal Considerations

Training and development specialists are supposed to know labor laws and other regulations that refer to the company where they work. This would allow them to inform employees about the recent legislature. Choosing new specialist for this position, managers have to avoid discrimination based on age, race, disability or faith (Deb, 2006). It is more reasonable to recruit specialists with the Bachelor’s degree or the Master’s degree.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the employee training and development is today strategic in nature and helps to satisfy needs of employers and employees. In particular, it motivates the productivity of staff and company. However, small and large companies have various attitudes to this training. For example, multinational companies have more serious and fundamental approach. Globalization has increased the importance of multicultural diversity training. However, it is necessary to consider legal issues during choosing a training specialist.

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