Saifullah Tariq

06885

Importance of Training and Development in HR

The article, Benefits of Training and Development for Individuals and Teams,
Organizations, and Society, gives one definition each for training and
development. The definitions are:
Training: the systematic approach to affecting individuals knowledge, skills,
and attitudes in order to improve individual, team, and organizational
effectiveness.
Development: systematic efforts affecting individuals knowledge or skills for
purposes of personal growth or future jobs and or/roles.
These definitions seem a little similar, when in fact there are a lot of
differences between the two. Training is specific job related while
development is more general knowledge. Also, development is more long
term and career oriented while training is short term and focuses mainly on
the present.
This article provides a review of some of the training and development
research done over the past few years. It focuses primarily on the benefits of
training for individuals, teams, organizations and society.
The article says there is documented evidence that training not only
positively impacts job performance of individuals and teams, but also the
attitude of the employees. According to the author, training has a positive
impact but the size of the impact depends primarily on the training delivery
method and the skill being trained. He also goes on to say that training has
the biggest impact on declarative and procedural knowledge. It also
increases consistency in employee performance.
Moving on to the benefits of training for organizations, the article says that
there is improved organizational performance but also reduced costs,
increase in social capital and employee satisfaction, and better employee
turnover rates. Training also benefits society as a whole as it increases the
skill level of a large number of people, which in turn helps the economic
growth of a country. An example given in the article is that if a countrys
government spends 11 million on training the workforce, the countrys
revenue would increase by 114 million. That is the effect training can have
on the economy of a country. Once the governments around the world

realized the benefits of training the countrys workforce, they started

introducing policies to train people on a national level, to in turn increase the
economic growth of the country.
However, training does not always mean increased performance or
efficiency. The organization should first assess whether training is even
needed or not, and more importantly, whether the employees are willing to
attend the training sessions and learn new skills and methods. Also, the
organization should also assess whether the bosses of the employees being
sent for training sessions are willing to let their underlings apply the new
methods and skills properly.
Lastly, the article says that individual training benefits pass on to team level
benefits and team level benefits pass on to organizational level benefits.
However, there is no evidence as to what factors affect this transfer of
benefits between different levels of an organization.
Training has a lot of benefits for a variety of different entities. However, it is
only effective when paired with the right conditions in the organization,
which includes the relationships between the employees, or the attitudes of
the people being sent for training, or what kind of training they are being
sent for. However, most important of all are the HR practices in the
organization. What matters is why and how a certain HR practice is
implemented in the organization, and whether any research has been done
before deciding upon any HR policy.
Reference:
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ajv2/courses/13c_psyc630002/Aguinis%20&
%20Kraiger%20(2009)%20ARP.pdf