employee training

employee training, vocational instruction for employed persons.

During and after World War II, in-service training by employers became a common practice. The rapid changeover in industry from peace to war led to training schemes for semiskilled workers, for workers transferred to new jobs, and for women newly brought into industry. Thereafter, the rapid contemporary advance of technological change made training a necessity in almost all walks of life. At the operating level in industry and in public utilities, new techniques, new methods, new tools, new synthetics, new sources of power, and increased uses of automation have brought extensive changes in the past decades, and the rate of change tends to increase as time goes on. Comparable changes are taking place in the office with the extended use of computers and data processors, which provide for the storing and recall of information in amounts unknown 20 years ago.

All of this brought about a new approach to training. Great emphasis is now placed on a good start through initial job training, supplemented by orientation sessions or by attractively produced printed material describing the nature and objectives of the employment and the conditions of work. Since changes are frequent with technological advances, refresher training has become common in clerical as well as in industrial work.

For the more technical skills, it is quite common in the United States for the large employer to make arrangements with a university to set up special courses; in Great Britain it is more usual to encourage employees to attend regular class facilities to obtain technical certificates. Sometimes this is achieved by “sandwich” training, periods on the job alternating with periods at a technical institute. Many employers encourage further education by paying tuition fees or by allowing free time to attend classes. Some very large corporations have developed their own systems of technical classes, supplementary to direct job training.

This widespread interest in training has led to considerable innovation in method. Formal lectures have given way to group discussion. The case-study method has become popular; a problem situation is presented in considerable detail and trainees are asked to make suggestions for its solution. Another new technique is role playing. Members of the training staff create a situation by playacting, and the trainees either comment on what is taking place or participate in the attempt to find a solution, or they perform functions or services in conditions that simulate their working environment. Attention also has been given to audiovisual aids. Sensitivity training has been introduced to help individuals to study their own behaviour and reactions to one another by means of group discussion in which there is frank analysis of interrelationships between members of the group.

New industries have created new needs. The instruction of airline flight attendants has become a highly developed operation for the major airlines. Television- and sound-broadcasting organizations have introduced training schemes to improve the quality of their program services. At United Nations headquarters, a training scheme has been developed for the guides who conduct visitors around the building, including daily briefing on the international events on which they may be questioned.

Initiative in training lies with the organization rather than with industry, and the large corporation tends to develop a variety of training projects and adequate administration of training. In a large organization, the individual employee needs to be introduced to his task and to identify himself with it, so as not to be lost in its complexity, and he needs to have subsequent periods of training to keep abreast with developments. In small- and medium-sized concerns, some managements are interested in training, while some tend to regard it as a luxury. It is impossible to determine which industries give the most attention to formal training; it depends on the initiative of the management rather than on the nature of the work.

Corporation schools in the United States date from the 1890s; the National Association of Corporate Training was created in 1919. Training schemes also have been supported by professional groups, such as the International City Managers’ Association, the Public Personnel Association, and the Council of State Governments. The Industrial Training Act, which came into force in Great Britain in 1964, provided for the establishment of an Industrial Training Board for each industry to make specific recommendations concerning the form and content of training courses and the standards to be set, and to recommend appropriate further education. By the 1990s it had been replaced with a network of 82 Training and Enterprise Councils in England and Wales and also of 22 Local Enterprise Companies in Scotland. These independent companies, operated by private business leaders, manage a variety of job-training programs on behalf of the British government.

With the rapid advances in technology and the growing complexity of business and industry, management training has become accepted as a necessity in both the public and private sectors. In the United States, graduate business education and senior executive training schemes, such as the advanced management program for senior executives at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, were already well established in the immediate postwar period. In Great Britain the Administrative Staff College (now Henley Management College) was set up at Henley-on-Thames in 1945 to offer short courses in problems of advanced management. It employs a novel technique of training by group initiative, drawing its inspiration from the professional experience of the participants. It has been copied successfully in several other countries. Individual corporations have also established institutions of their own for the development of general management techniques at senior levels.

The training of government staff varies considerably in terms of different national traditions of administration and education. Full-scale training of civil servants began in many Western countries in the decades after World War II. The most important development was perhaps the founding in 1945 of the National School of Administration in Paris, which serves as both a professional school and a recruitment agency for the French government’s administrative and diplomatic services. Great Britain, India, and other countries have developed their own schools to train civil servants.

The less-developed countries have unique problems of employee training, their economic advance depending largely on the introduction of new and unfamiliar techniques. Training organization is needed in basic skills, both industrial and clerical, and for the provision of adequate quantities of trained technicians, supervisors, and competent managers. To achieve planned progress these nations need skilled administrators in large numbers, and above all they require educators and instructors. In some, the primary and higher educational structure is inadequate for current needs, no vocational training is built into the school system, and little or no science and technology are offered in the universities.

Inevitably they must send some of their key personnel for training abroad and call in foreign experts under one or another of the technical-assistance programs. But foreign experts cannot train workers for a whole industry or instruct the staff necessary to organize an entire national development program. They must concentrate first on building up local groups of indigenous experts, with aptitude for training others, organized if possible on an institutional basis.

The United Nations and its specialized agencies contribute to the development-training schemes in these countries, emphasizing development of institutional training. The Regional Economic Commissions have sponsored the establishment of regional institutes of economic development in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and East Asia and have encouraged schemes for training in statistics to provide a sound basis for development planning. A particularly successful project is the Institute of Public Administration in Costa Rica, whose task is to train the staff necessary to administer the coordinated regional economic development of Central America. Eleven former French-African territories have established national schools of administration, noticeably influenced by the school in Paris.

Perhaps the most intractable problem associated with training is its evaluation. Its actual cost may be calculated in terms of the expenses of its administration and the salary costs of both the training staff and of the trainees while they are on nonproductive work. But the quality and ultimate success can be determined only by a value judgment on whether the effort seems justified as conducive to greater overall efficiency and to more successful operations. Craft skills and routine occupational skills can be measured by tests based on agreed standards, but occupations measurable in this way account only for a limited range of training activities. In the office, typing and shorthand work can be tested for speed and accuracy, but a great deal of clerical work cannot be analyzed statistically. Supervision, management, and administrative tasks depend on personal capability as much as they do on knowledge and experience. Knowledge can be imparted and experience acquired; the guided development of personality is more difficult. How far the training opportunities offered to a senior executive during his career have helped his professional development cannot be mathematically assessed.