Shirley J. Caruso, Ed. D.

Today’s organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of developing their human resources. The training and development function within organizations is now popularly referred to as human resource development (HRD).  HRD coordinates the organization’s efforts to provide training and development experiences for its employees.  Employee training can be defined as a planned attempt to facilitate employee learning of job related knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors or helping them correct deficiencies in their performance. In contrast, development is an effort to provide employees with skills needed for both present and future jobs. Developing human resources is the next stage in the process of achieving organizational skills. Training can be perceived as a method of creating intellectual capital.   Intellectual capital refers to the ideas and knowledge that employees own that make a company competitive.

Organizations provide training for numerous reasons. Training can be provided to orient new hires to the organization or teach them how to perform in their tasks, improve on their current performance, and prepare the employees for future promotions or for the coming changes in design, processes or technological advances in their present jobs. Global competition has warranted human resource development professionals to train more and more for the organization to provide quality management and customer service training in an attempt to keep up with rising consumer expectations and the emergence of new technological advances required in training. Today, training should be tailored to fit an organization’s strategy and structures.

An example of training strategy for organizational success is evident in the recent emphasis on continuous learning in organizations to help employees understand the entire work system including relationship between jobs, work units and the organization. A learning organization is one whose employees are continuously attempting to learn new ideas and apply them to improve products and the entire service quality. Training is seen as an essential role in implementing an organization-wide culture of change efforts such as adopting total quality management, and developing commitments to customers. All employees should be provided with systematic orientation when they first join the organization.  Orientation introduces new employees to the organization and their new tasks, managers, and co-workers so that they can become contributors towards the organization’s success.

HRD is the integrated use of training, organizational development and career development efforts to improve individual, groups and organization effectiveness. HRD helps to develop key competitiveness that enables individuals in organizations to perform current and future jobs through planned learning activities.  HRD also helps to manage various work groups within organization, motivation issues and manage changes in the organization. HRD ensures an alignment between an individual and the organization’s needs.