What a Holistic Education and Training Program can do for Organizational and Employee Development
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More and more companies are investing in employee education and training. The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) estimates that American companies spend more than a hundred billion dollars annually on employee training, with about 75% spent on in-house learning programs.

Company education and training programs have one overriding purpose: to raise the productivity of employees. Human Resource Development departments are the offices charged with formulating and implementing education and training programs.

HRD practitioners agree on the premise that satisfied employees are often the most productive. Many people will relate production to the satisfaction of employees on the level of pay and benefits that they get from their jobs. There is truth to this, but it is only part of the reason. Relationships in the workplace, as well as employees’ competence, also have a lot to do with employee productivity.

A good education and training program is holistic in approach and addresses the two important aspects that affect employee performance and productivity. First, it must equip employees with the tools of the trade. Second, it must create a workplace culture of professionalism, loyalty, and commitment, and most importantly, warm and open relationships among employees.

The first aspect of education and training – skills development – is easier to accomplish than the second aspect. However, though the competency program might be appropriate, it can always be undermined by unhappy and unmotivated employees.

An education and training program must be proactive and never reactive. Its main purpose is not to address employee problems that might threaten the stability of the company. Rather, it should be to transform its human resources into agents of development. Thus, its formulation is participative with ideas from management and rank in file employees incorporated in the final program.

There are many tools available to HRD managers that can be used to formulate long term and short term education and training programs. The Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is the most potent tool of HRD managers. Depending on how it is constructed, it can be used to ferret out most of employees’ problems and issues that affect performance, starting from lacks of skills, strained relationships with co-employees, job dissatisfaction to simple poor work attitudes and habits. TNA results, plus information culled from employees’ files, enable HR mangers to complete an education and training program that corresponds to the needs of employees and organizations.

Managing a company education and training program involves all employees. The HR department may be the lead agency in its formulation and responsible for the conduct of actual trainings or for bringing in external expert assistance, but line mangers have a crucial rule in seeing to it that lessons are applied in actual situations. This is the reason why the first people that are required to learn the rudiments of human resource management are line managers who are directly responsible for employees’ performance.

It is common for HR personnel to consider the conduct of training sessions as the end of their responsibility to employees and company. This is not true. The education and training program is always an ongoing concern and its responsibility extends to monitoring and evaluating results based on changes in employee behavior. If it improves performance or changes the environment of the workplace for the better, then it is effective. For HR managers, gathering feedback and tracking changes are the most efficient ways of evaluating the effectiveness of education and training programs.