Training & Development - Career Management Flashcards
Human and Social Capital
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Human Capital - individual’s skills, knowledge and expertise
- Developed via formal training and education
- Source of competitive advantage to individuals/organisations
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Social Capital - network of relationships that can be used for the good of the individual/collective
- Network of formal and informal ties
- Trust facilitating co-ordination & co-operation for the mutual benefit
- High-qualityy relationships
Can be very valued in some cultures (i.e. anglosaxon). It will help you get through the interview/recruitment but if you don’t have the skills you will not thrive or stay.
Global Human Capital Trends report
- Barriers between work and life have been all but eliminated - employees are “always on”- hyperconnected to their jobs through pervasive mobile technology
- Learning and development issues are no. 3 most important talent challenge (despite this demand, capabilities in learning dropped significantly)
- Companies are struggling to redesign the training environment, incorporate new learning technologies and utilize all digital learning tools available.
- Engagement and culture as the no. 1 issue around the world (87 percent of companies rating it important or very important) and half the respondents rated their leadership shortfalls as “very important”
Comparative MD :
- US/UK - focus on general management; training corrects individual weaknesses and contributes to business strategy and performance
- Continental Europe - leaders are ‘born not made’ – innate ability/personality as the most important factor in making an effective manager
- Germany - management is about functional specialism and technical skills
- China - discursive and group work methods of Western management development clash with culture of conformity, social status and position of the expert
National systems for training
- VOLUNTARIST (UK, Sweden, Australia)
Employers train to meet business objectives; market mechanisms operate to balance the supply and demand for training
- FUNCTIONALIST (Germany, France)
Government regulates /legislates the degree to which employers provide functional/educational training
Training methods trends:
- Learning as ‘acquisition’ of knowledge versus learning as ‘participation’
- Focus on ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ skills
- Didactic methods (e.g., lectures, films) that convey cognitive knowledge versus experiential methods (e.g., role plays, simulations) that convey the feeling of cross-cultural experiences
Cross-cultural differences in teaching methods
- European and Asian resistance to US case study method (Saner & Yiu, 1994)
- Anglo-Saxon teacher as a Catalyst;
- Germanic teacher as an Instructor;
- Asian teacher as a Referee;
- Eastern Europe teacher as a Gate Keeper
Training methods :
- Off-the-job training (classroom instruction; audiovisual; e-learning; simulations)
- On-the-job training (apprenticeship; internship; action learning; job rotation; secondments; shadowing)
- Systems of career management (coaching; mentoring)
- Self-development (self-assessment)
- Collaborative training methods and team training
The use of social learning tools
(The UK Learning Factbook 2013 Bersin by Deloitte)
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The new learning paradigm:
- Giving up some control over the learning environment
- Learners have to adopt a more self-directed approach
- More independent and collaborative
- Communities of practice (CoP) - a group of people who share an interest in a common topic, and who deepen their knowledge in this area through on-going interaction and relationship-building.
- Networking tools - LinkedIn, Facebook, Glassdoor enable people to easily monitor, connect, share
- Wikis (“wiki” from the Hawaiian word for “fast”) stands for web pages that can be collectively and collaboratively edited by readers.
- Blogs and podcasts - “blog” (a shortened form of the phrase “web log”) a form of personal publishing that readers can discuss.
What is Training ?
Training can be defined as: “planned and systematic modification of behaviour through learning events, programmes and instructions that enables individuals to achieve the levels of knowledge, skill and competence needed tocarry out their work effectively”
Training is intended to result in a changed behaviour in the workplace leading to improvedd individual performance to meet the needs of an organisation at a particular point in time
It has been associated with a deficit model where provision is used to fill gaps in capability
What are the steps in the implementation of Human Ressources Development (HRD) ?
What refrains companies from investing in HRD ?
- Establish a cause-effect relatioship between HRD investments and improved performances
- Cost of: training equipment, payroll of internal and external specialists, developing trainig materials, hours of works lost by those trained; on the basis of affordability or relative to other firms in the same market
- Training everyone or only the bests? Conflicts of interest
- Cost of offering unnecessary training
- Employees might benefit from the training and then leave as they became more marketable
- Too many individual needs within the organisation
- HRD budget often cut when firms are experiencing challenging economic conditions
What drives a company to invest in HRD?
INTERNAL
- To fill vacancies or prepare for succession
- Facilitate organisational change
- Employee career and personnal development needs
- Cost of not training
EXTERNAL
- Technological, legislative or market change leading to skill deficiency
(i. e. the equal opportunities legislation would require managers involved in employee selection to undergo awareness training) - Changing external labour market context: skills supply, level of employment and education
Training is not a solution for everything:
It is not necessarily a solution to perceived under-performance.
Redesign of jobs, external recruitment or the re-evaluation of the conditions under which employees work might yield more effective results
Coaching :
Conducted by immediate supervisor; showing people how to apply knowledge they already possess (Conway, 1994)
- Short-term purpose
- Sometimes focus on remedying employee under-performance
- Can be conducted to create a coaching culture ‘where coaching is the predominant style of managing and working together’
Problems with coaching
- Are managers skilled enough?
- Are they able to transfer their skills/effective coaches?
- Difficult to evaluate the effectiveness
- Conflict between treating all subordinates equally and the need for treating protege differently and better
Mentoring:
Older individuals serving as role models and providing career guidance, task assistance, and social support to younger colleagues (Kram, 1985)
(i.e. mentor might counsel a protégé with personal problems to cut down on work hours while direct supervisor will have different priorities)
- Long-term relationship
- Impacts on the speed of assimilation of proteges, their commitment, advancement, salary progression, reduction of stress and anxiety
- Used as part of succession planning or to prepare candidates for senior management roles
