Training and Development

India is passing through convulsive changes due to advancement in science and technology but, at the same time, over 1,100 million people of this country are caught in the twilight zone of development and under-development. Despite the fact of viewing human resource as an asset, there is a gloomy side to this issue. An element which has surfaced in the warning signal of the World Bank as related to India is that by the turn of this century, India has nearly three-fourths of the world’s illiterate population. On one side we have an abundance of human resource, the brain trust of a nation, and on the other side, we are in a state of emergency to convert the human recycling of human resource through formal, informal and non-formal education involving training and retraining.

Training- Meaning and Scope

Training is an organised procedure which brings about a semi-permanent change in behaviour, for a definite purpose. The three main areas involved are skills, knowledge and attitudes (sometimes called social skills) but always with a definite purpose in mind. It differs from education in many ways, for all practical purposes training is aimed at specific, job-based objectives rather than the broader society-based aims of education. Historically, trainees were expected to learn their jobs by ‘exposure’, i.e. by picking up what they could from experienced fellow employees. They were not termed trainees since they were not systematically trained, but, they enjoyed such titles as helpers, apprentices, in industrial circles. But this method of learning was haphazard, learning time was lengthy, motivational needs often neglected with the possibility of many incorrect procedures being passed on. There was also a certain fear from experienced members of the workforce that passing on their skills would ultimately lead to their own exit. Planned economy and economic growth in the country has given emphasis to the need for a more systematic means of training for jobs skills. Thus, was born a more analytical approach of training.

Caution: It is important that due attention is paid to training right from the time when one first starts doing a job.

If not, as is the unfortunate experience of many, it attempts at learning games and sports, it will be extremely difficult, if not almost impossible to unlearn what has once been learnt wrongly on one’s own during the initial stages.

A job is not learnt merely by instructions. By telling and showing step by step the way it ought to be done, the job is perhaps presently learnt but not done well when left on one’s own. By showing and making the trainee do the job step by step along with instruction, the chances are, that the job will be learnt and yet there is no guarantee that the job will be done well for long. The job will be really learnt satisfactorily by making an individual repeat and demonstrated step by step during instruction. By keeping a watchful eye at close intervals in the initial stages and by checking progress periodically later on, one can ensure that the job will be well done for all time to come.

The essential elements in any commercial enterprise are materials, equipment and human resource. Training, allied to the other human resource specialisations within management, ensures a pool of manpower of the required levels of expertise at the right time. But, firstly, consider the attention given by an average organisation to the provision of materials, machinery and equipment. Then compare the commitment to the third essential factor in the production cycle, viz human resources. One of the most important factors in this regard is the traditional view of training and trainers. They are seen as an expense, a service, as second rate to production or as a necessary evil. Training has tended to fall behind other management activities, especially in the planning phase. It is often carried out as a reaction to immediate needs, a patch up operation in many cases, instead of an ordered activity.

If we accept the fact that people are a company’s greatest asset, one remedy for these traditional attitudes is to convince the top management that training is a principal management function. Another remedy is for the trainers to display an increasing professionalism and so demand a chance for their voice to be heard at top level, along with other managers. The image of training in the concern is often based on concepts of cost-effectiveness. The alternate view of training as welfare activity is that it withers away in the face of depression in the trade cycles. So training must be an activity open to the analytical eye of the accountant. Yet, in some respects, it is an act of faith to pass on one’s knowledge, skills and attitudes to those who follow.

Beneficiaries

The beneficiaries of training are:

1. Organization:

• — Gets more effective in decision-making and problem-solving
• — Improve the morale of the workforce.
• — Helps people identify the organizational goal.
• — Aids in developing leadership skills, motivation, loyalty and better attitude.
• — Aids in improving productivity and quality of work.
• — Aids in understanding and carrying out organizational policies.
• — Aids in organizational development.
• — Creates an appropriate climate for growth and communication.
• — Helps employees adjust to change.

2. Employees:

• — Increases job satisfaction and recognition.
• — Moves a person towards personal goals while improving interactive skills.
• — Helps in eliminating fear of attempting new tasks.
• — Provides the trainee an avenue for growth.
• — Through training and development, motivational variables of recognition, achievement, growth, responsibility and advancement are internalised and operationalised.
• — Provides information for improving leadership, communication skills and attitudes.
• — Helps to handle stress, tension, frustration and conflict.

3. Personnel and human relations:

• — Improve inter-personnel skills.
• — Improves morale.
• — Builds cohesiveness in groups.
• — Makes the organization a better place to work and live.
• — Provides information on other governmental laws and administrative policies.

Forces influencing working and learning

Till the sixties, training activity in most of the Indian organisations was either totally absent or partly present in a rudimentary form. Even this was limited to some well established industries in the corporate sector. However, in the seventies the Indian organisations became aware of the need for development of managers for better management of industries. Thus began the Executive Development Programmes started mostly by a few educational institutions like the Administrative Staff College of India and the Institutes of Management. Some large organisations like TISCO established their own training centres and some more started programmes with the help of outside faculty. All these programmes were limited to ExecutiveDevelopment only. Four decades ago, a fillip was given to Training Within Industry (TWI) by ILO to which many industries started TWI programmes which were mostly on-the-job training to the workers. This programme also decipated after some time as it was introduced in the industry at the instance of the government and not by the conviction of industrial organisations. Even though the importance of human resource in the industry was felt by many organisations in the seventies, the training was given mainly to the executives with a view to develop the organisation. Many organisations considered that trained managers would manage to improve production and productivity through the workforce in the industry. The worker’s training was limited to on-the-job for better production and productivity.

For quite sometime now, there has been a crying need in the country that all agencies have a role to play in influencing and developing our vast human resource. Timperly, a British authority on the subject of Manpower Planning has recommended the creation of a central agency in each nation the sole purpose of which would be to develop human capital, and ensure its investment in the development of the national economy. It is only after the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s stress on Human Resource Development (HRD) that training has taken a front seat in the national economy. He had even established a separate Ministry for Human Resource Development in November 1985.

All the industrial organisations realised the importance of training their employees for better production and for improved productivity. But still the stress was more on management development and less on worker development. If one analyses the way the present day training and development programmes for workers take place in the country, even these half-hearted training programmes for workers neither meet the requirement of the organisation nor of the individual in the public sector approach while in the private sector it is mainly for the development of the organisation.

Most of the Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) and many large and medium sized private sector establishments have taken up HRD in big way. However, training in industry is done on an ad hoc basis. There is no systematic approach for training. The long and short-term objectives are not identified. There is no survey of training needs. In most instances the training is either a deviation from the busy work life or respite from the tedious industrial environment.