Traditionally, individuals were trained around current job-based deficiencies and skill needs.

However, a few exemplary organizations, view a T&D as an continuous process and a primary

source of sustainable competitive advantage.

In these organizations, T&D becomes the critical means for creating readiness and flexibility for change across all organizational levels.

Readiness and flexibility are achieved largely through

supervisory, management, and executive training.

This study was designed to understand and describe how these best-in-class organizations design and utilize supervisory and management T&D to achieve and sustain competitive advantage.

Thus the goal of this paper is to collect benchmark

information and derive a model of how the best T& D organizations structure, implement, and conduct management-level T&D. 26 of the 62 organizations served as a benchmark. These make forty two percent of the organization.

Written information and interviews were taken from the heads of the departments. These were specialists, key consultants, executives and managers. A best-practices model was developed from the commonalities of the information collected.

TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK

SHEWHART OR DEMING CYCLE

 How do exemplary companies tie T&D to their strategic business plans? In these organizations, there is a structured linkage between

the organization's strategic mission and the goals of the T&D

program. T&D goals and processes are reviewed and updated annually according to the changing strategic needs of the business.

At Apple's corporate T&D headquarters - Apple

University - regular forums with executives are

conducted to exchange information about the strategic direction of the firm and its business units. In addition, professionals from Apple University

are permanently assigned to business units and

serve as a continuous information funnel between these units and the university.

Apple also uses its worldwide information network to collect information about changing business requirements, and to

facilitate immediate responsiveness in T&D offerings.

In another corporation, Motorola, the CEO is one of four

"outside" members of the Advisory Board of Directors to

Motorola University . This creates a link between the CEO's agenda and its implementation through T&D.

At P &G, members of the executive committee teach at P&G College whenever they are physically nearby. For example, over the course of 1992, the CEO had taught at P&G College nine times. In Corning Glass Corporation, question "What do we need to do with people to meet the

development needs of the company?" has been

addressed by the Board of Directors annually since 1979.

Fifty-eight percent of the organizations interviewed, have

some form of explicit T&D policies.

Objectives are achieving consistent employee access to, and participation in, T&D, budget allocation, required hours of participation, or required T&D before or after promotions. Other rules-oriented policies refer to the annual number of

hours each employee is obliged to spend in T&D.

Some companies, such as ARCO and 3M, specify a minimum of 40 hours of training per year.

AT&T Universal Card, requires 80 hours of annual training per employee, and at Andersen Consulting, Zytec, and the Saturn

division of General Motors, the figure is 100 hours.

Many organizations like P&G establish T&D policies as part of structured career paths, a prerequisite for consideration for promotion, or a requirement once the promotion is obtained.

Benchmark organizations also strive to mold the attitudes and behaviors of their supervisors and managers through values-oriented T&D statements. For instance, some of the organizations like Coca

Cola (according to its mission statement 2000),

assert that "every manager is held accountable for the development of his/her employees.

Managers' own rewards and promotions are made

contingent upon their success as developers of talent.

Needs are influenced by factors both internal and external to the organization. In these benchmark organizations, the establishment of T&D needs is driven most often by the organization's mission and strategy, with an average rating of 6.27. Individual performance factors, environmental trends, and job-based information appear to be less influential in establishing T&D needs, at 5.31, 5.08, and 5.04 respectively.

Several

organizations,

including

3M,

Apple,

Corning, and Motorola, conduct annual conferences with the organization's most senior executives to elicit their views of the skills that will be needed to

achieve strategic short-term and long-term goals.

In these companies, however, environmental

demands drive adjustments to the business strategy, with T&D changes implemented as a result of decisions to modify the business strategy.

For example, Xerox benchmarks other exemplary companies and collects information from their partners and suppliers to

best understand the economic, cultural, and technological

trends affecting their business.

Similarly, Northern Telecom uses customer focus groups to

learn about product and service requirements to identify employee development needs.

Transfer refers to the degree of continuity between learning in the T&D context, and behaviors and results in the job environment. The first critical requirement for transfer is an overlap

between learning in training, and requirements on the

job. The overlap assures that the knowledge, abstract concepts, attitudes, or behaviors acquired through T&D

match the strategic business needs.

The simplest way to maximize overlap between the job and training environments is through on-the-job training.

General Mills indicated that only about 10% of its training

occurs away from the job.

Texas Instruments, uses an HR system in which critical competencies are derived from job analyses. These critical competencies serve as the common underlying competency framework for selection, promotion, and reward decisions,

and for establishing T&D requirements for a given job.

At Northern Telecom, continued promotion requires active participation in training activities.

Xerox implements T&D sequentially across the organization, from the top down. With the exception of the chief executive

and the most junior person in the organization, everyone

receives the T&D twice, once as trainee and once as trainer to his/her direct reports or peers. In Xerox, this is called "LUTI" Learn, Use, Train, and Inspect.

How do exemplary organizations determine the content of T&D?

Benchmark organizations derive the content of T&D from their strategic objectives, culture and values, and their present and predicted competency and skill needs. The most commonly addressed T&D area is leadership training. An example is Coca-Cola's 10-week management development program for persons in line to become general managers. The program includes traditional leadership training, as well as internally designed simulations that are "mirror images of business in Coca-Cola," and an action learning program in which four member teams are given cross-functional and cross-cultural project assignments and sent to locations outside their native countries.

GE also employs an action learning approach in its four-week training program for mid- to senior-level executives. Teams of executives are given actual business problems identified by the company's top officials, such as Chief Executive Jack Welch. After a month, teams make presentations to Welch and other senior managers. With the help of consultants and business school professors, the student executives go around the world learning to function effectively in teams, finding the information they need, and making decisions with little time and information.

HOW DO EXEMPLARY ORGANIZATIONS CHOOSE THE BEST T&D METHOD?

Choice of T&D delivery methods depends on the organizational culture and values, T&D objectives and content, the profiles of trainees and trainers, financial and technological resource availability, time, location, and political constraints. Sixty-nine percent of T&D is designed and delivered in-house, compared to 31% purchased from outside vendors. A second T&D methods involves attempts to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of off-the-job T&D. Simulations and off-hour learning like at Boeing is used for this purpose.

GE, for example, opens its doors to its customers and suppliers to participate in its unique "Work Out" training programs as a means of elevating the quality of the goods or services supplied and reducing their costs. Second is using technologies like at IBM during the 1980s, technology was used to deliver no more than five percent of the company's T&D. By 1990 that figure stood at 30%, and by the end of the decade it is expected to rise to 60% of all T&D delivered. Apple's "electronic campus" draws on the computer manufacturer's globally networked information system to facilitate T&D information exchange.

HOW DO EXEMPLARY ORGANIZATIONS CHOOSE THE BEST T&D METHOD?

Federal Express relies on an interactive video network to deliver training to 45,000 employees and delivers college courses and degree programs via personal computers. They even have a leadership series broadcast on an internal television network, FXTV.
Mentoring is used at Corning.

Kirkpatrick's (1976) survey of 100 companies indicated that while over 75% of the firms measured participant reactions, fewer than 50% measured knowledge changes or skills learned, and still fewer measured changes in behaviors (20%) or results (15%).

An Industry Group study (1995) reported that 43% of the firms measured business results attributable to training and 60% evaluated behavior on the job relevant to training.
Xerox uses multiple methods, including observations of trainees once they return to their regular positions, interviews with trainees' managers, and examination of trainees' post-T&D performance appraisals, to ascertain whether T&D has impacted job behaviors .

T&D FRAMEWORK, PHASE 3: CHECK

Johnson & Johnson incorporates 360 degree appraisal (for example, evaluations by the employee's superior, direct reports, peers, customers, and self-ratings) into their T&D evaluation portfolio. The evaluation phase of T&D is an area in which even the best organizations practice only a minimum level of assessments. One reason for this is that T&D in exemplary organizations is part of the organization's mission and values and is not subject to the rules of cost-benefit evaluation.

T&D represents a belief in the value of continuous learning, that over time a highly skilled and informed workforce will be more focused on the organization's strategic goals and values, and more capable, productive, and creative in ways that might not be immediately measurable.

One recent study found that training budgets are effected most during business downturns. That is not the case, in benchmark organizations.

Ninety-two percent of interviewees indicated that T&D is central to the organization's goals - so important that only 15% expressed willingness to cut T&D during tough times. Budget priorities are tied directly to the strategic mission.

CONCLUSION
The framework presented in this paper includes structural features, policies, and practices that together add up to a climate of continuous learning. An effective T&D system is a result of the confluence of elements of the T&D framework, and the extent to which they are embedded in the organization's structures, policies, and practices. T & D is important because no organization can have the foresight to predict the precise talents it will need 10, or even five years from now. How can organizations respond to and overcome the risks associated with market uncertainty? By developing an internal discipline that creates readiness for several alternative strategic directions.