Typical Topics of Employee Training

Typical Topics of Employee Training

1. Communications: The increasing diversity of today's workforce brings a wide variety of languages and customs.
2. Computer skills: Computer skills are becoming a necessity for conducting administrative and office tasks.
3. Customer service: Increased competition in today's global marketplace makes it critical that employees understand and meet the needs of customers.
4. Diversity: Diversity training usually includes explanation about how people have different perspectives and views, and includes techniques to value diversity
5. Ethics: Today's society has increasing expectations about corporate social responsibility. Also today's diverse workforce brings a wide variety of values and morals to the workplace.
6. Human relations: The increased stresses of today's workplace can include misunderstandings and conflict. Training can people to get along in the workplace.
7. Quality initiatives: Initiatives such as Total Quality Management, Quality Circles, benchmarking etc. require basic training about quality concepts, guidelines and standards for quality etc.
8. Safety: Safety training is critical where working with heavy equipment , hazardous chemicals, repetitive activities etc. but can also be useful with practical advice for avoiding assaults etc.
9. Sexual harassment: Sexual harassment training usually includes careful description of the organization's policies about sexual harassment especially about what are inappropriate behaviors.

Training and Development Needs Analysis of an Organization

Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is often considered the most important step among the steps in the training cycle and therefore, should precede any training intervention. However, in spite of needs assessment’s important role, the literature contains little empirical work on the topic. Understand the role of existing training needs analysis process of organization and the factors that affect the process to identify the needs and the impact of this on improving organisational performance. TNA plays a vital role in current competitive business environment where machine continue to replace human workforce demanding much more focused contributions and skills from employees.

A number of theorists identify TNA as the starting point in the training process (Wright and Geroy, 1992). The rationale of the TNA is also explained as the only process through which an organizations performance objectives can be realized given that TNA’s basic task is to match the organization’s training needs and content of the training (Shibani, 2017). 2^nd phase of the TNA is to prioritize the more important and urgent training needs and design the training program accordingly (Wilson, 2005). researchers and theorists over the years have pointed out the gap between recommended systematic and theoretical approaches to training needs analyses and the ad hoc training decisions implemented by organizations in practice (Taylor, O'Driscoll and Binning, 2018).

Relation between Training and Development

There is a relation between training and development, and there is clear difference between the two based on goals to be achieved. Development is made to answer the training problems

TRAINING	DEVELOPMENT
Training is meant for operatives	Development is meant for executives
It is reactive process	It is pro- active process
AIM: To develop additional skills	AIM: To develop the total personality
It is short term process	It is continuous process
OBJECTIVE: To meet the present need of an employee	OBJECTIVE: To meet the future need of an employee
Initiative is taken by the management	Initiative is taken by an individual.

References :

Armstrong, M. (2006) Strategic Human Resource Management: A Guide to Action. Kogan Page, London

Aswathappa, K. (2008), Human Resource Management: Text and Cases, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited, Delhi.

Blanchard, P. N. Thacker, J. W. and Ram V. A., (2010). Effective Training System, Strategies, and Practices. 4th ed.  New Delhi, Pearson Education.

Erasmus, B.J., Loedolff, P.V.Z., Mda, T.V. and  Nel, P.S. (2011). Managing training and development, 5th ed. Cape Town, Oxford University Press.

Mondy, R. W. (2008) Human Resource Management (10th Edn) Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey