Employee Training and Development, 4th edition

Citation

Golam Hossan, C. (2007), "Employee Training and Development, 4th edition", Management Research News, Vol. 30 No. 12, pp. 955-956. https://doi.org/10.1108/01409170710833376

Investment in training and development represents a major portion of company's budget for capacity building. However, it is being always a challenge to ensure effectiveness of training and development programs. Keeping that in mind, Employee Training and Development has offered several alternative strategies and approaches to ensure effective design of training and development programs. The author is a physiologist with more than two decades of teaching and research experience in human resource management and has provided significant insights into scholarship and practice of training and development. The book focuses on a range of strategies and approaches for conducting training and development in the modern business organization.

This book primary written for students in number of programs including undergraduate and post graduate. HR practitioners, consultants, CEO's and mangers will find this book useful in planning their training program. In addition, people without formal HR education will also find this text useful.

Employee Training and Development contains thirteen chapters. Chapter 1, Introduction to Employee Training and Development, discusses key concepts associated with training and development and highlights how significantly it affects today's economy. Chapter 2, Strategic Training, explains how training can support the achievement of business goals. Chapter 3, Need Assessment, discusses the process of determining appropriateness of the training program before conducting the training by analyzing employees' knowledge, skills and abilities. Chapter 4, Learning Theories and Program Design, deals with various concepts of learning, environment for learning and how to build successful learning environments. Chapter 5, Transfer of Training, discusses how to enable the transfer of learning to the workplace as well as the development of off‐the‐job training at the workplace. Chapter 6, Training Evaluation, addresses two basic questions, why and how to evaluate training program in terms of the costs of training, ROI, learning effectiveness, behavioral change and overall performance improvement. A discussion of the most common and widely used training methods is presented on chapter 7, Traditional Training Method. Chapter 8, E‐Learning and Use of Technology in Training, introduces latest technology available for conducting training programs. Chapter 9, Employee Development, discusses strategies that organizations can follow for the development of their employees. Chapter 10, Special issues in training and Employee Development, focuses on the internal and external environmental factors of the organization which may affect training programs. Chapter 11, Careers and Career management, explores the topic of career development. Potential challenges of career management an employee might face in managing career is presented in Chapter 12 – Special challenges in Career Management. The concluding chapter 13, The Future of Training and Development, highlights future trends related to training delivery and the structure of the training program.

This text presents relevant recent industry cases at the beginning of each chapter and refers to case material throughout the chapter. Internet‐based applications and assignments to review the concepts are also provided at the end of each chapter. Step‐by step need assessment process discussed in this text is useful for practicing need assessment in the workplace. One of the challenges of off‐the‐job training program is to ensure that training is properly executed in the workplace. This text has addressed training transfer issues and discusses how to create a training environment to enables smooth transfer of skills to the workplace. This text presents sample measurement scales in respect to various aspect of evaluation which I feel would be very helpful to students and practitioners. While most of HR text focuses training from the employer perspective, this text included chapters which address training from the employees' perspective.

This text is very specific to USA and unfortunately tends to ignore the practice of training and development in other national settings. Inclusion of some business cases from different national settings would make this text more suitable for global workforce planning. Although E‐learning and use of technology in training outlines list of technologies currently available, discussion was limited. This element of the text could be strengthened.

Discussions of cross‐cultural issues, effectiveness of training in different geographical region are important issues that could be incorporated into the text more fully. Currently a wide range of HR information systems (HRIS) are available and widely used for conducting training program. I would have liked to see some discussion on the leading HRIS relevant to each topic. Comprehensive and integrated technology‐based training practical example could make technology concept more understandable for non‐technical HR professionals. An effort has been made in brief to explain the interface between HR system and training system though. While general discussion on training and development were well organized, it can be further enriched by some discussion on training trends on some specific industries. One of the major strengths of the text is its discussion of key concepts of training and development in an easy to read and digestible manner. To the authors credit he uses simple and easy to understand diagrams to explain quite complex processes. I also enjoyed the step‐by‐step approach. Overall, I recommend the purchase of this book as it is great value for money.