Training and Development
Training and development is a function of human resource management concerned with organizational activity aimed at bettering the performance of individuals and groups in organizational settings. It has been known by several names, including “human resource development”, and “learning and development”.
Training and development encompasses three main activities: training, education, and development.
- Training: This activity is both focused upon, and evaluated against, the job that an individual currently holds.
- Education: This activity focuses upon the jobs that an individual may potentially hold in the future, and is evaluated against those jobs.
- Development: This activity focuses upon the activities that the organization employing the individual, or that the individual is part of, may partake in the future, and is almost impossible to evaluate.
The “stakeholders” in training and development are categorized into several classes. The sponsors of training and development are senior managers. The clients of training and development are business planners. Line managers are responsible for coaching, resources, and performance. The participants are those who actually undergo the processes. The facilitators are Human Resource Management staff. And the providers are specialists in the field. Each of these groups has its own agenda and motivations, which sometimes conflict with the agendas and motivations of the others.
The conflicts that are the best part of career consequences are those that take place between employees and their bosses. The number one reason people leave their jobs is conflict with their bosses. And yet, as author, workplace relationship authority, and executive coach, Dr. John Hoover points out, “Tempting as it is, nobody ever enhanced his or her career by making the boss look stupid.” Training an employee to get along well with authority and with people who entertain diverse points of view is one of the best guarantees of long-term success. Talent, knowledge, and skill alone won’t compensate for a sour relationship with a superior, peer, or customer.
Typical roles in the field include executive and supervisory/management development, new-employee orientation, professional-skills training, technical/job training, customer-service training, sales-and-marketing training, and health-and-safety training. Job titles may include vice-president of organizational effectiveness, training manager or director, management development specialist, blended-learning designer, training-needs analyst, chief learning officer, and individual career-development advisor.
Talent development is the process of changing an organization, its employees, its stakeholders, and groups of people within it, using planned and unplanned learning, in order to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage for the organization. Rothwell notes that the name may well be a term in search of a meaning, like so much in management, and suggests that it be thought of as selective attention paid to the top 10% of employees, either by potential or performance.
While talent development is reserved for the top management it is becoming increasingly clear that career development is necessary for the retention of any employee, no matter what their level in the company. Research has shown that some type of career path is necessary for job satisfaction and hence job retention. Perhaps organizations need to include this area in their overview of employee satisfaction.
The term talent development is becoming increasingly popular in several organizations, as companies are now moving from the traditional term training and development. Talent development encompasses a variety of components such as training, career development, career management, and organizational development, and training and development. It is expected that during the 21st century more companies will begin to use more integrated terms such as talent development.
Coaching
Coaching is a training or development process via which an individual is supported while achieving a specific personal or professional competence result or goal. The individual receiving coaching may be referred to as coachee. Occasionally, the term coaching may be applied to an informal relationship between two individuals where one has greater experience and expertise than the other and offers advice and guidance as the other goes through a learning process, but coaching differs from mentoring by focusing upon competence specifics, as opposed to general overall development.
Some coaches use a style in which they ask questions and offer opportunities that will challenge the coachee to find answers from within him/herself. This facilitates the learner to discover answers and new ways of being based on their values, preferences and unique perspectives.
Coaching is not a practice restricted to external experts or providers. Many organizations expect their senior leaders and middle managers to coach their team members to reach higher levels of performance, increased job satisfaction, personal growth, and career development. Business coaching is not the same as mentoring. Mentoring involves a developmental relationship between a more experienced “mentor” and a less experienced partner, and typically involves sharing of advice. A business coach can act as a mentor given that he or she has adequate expertise and experience. However, mentorship is not a form of business coaching.
Executive Coaching
Executive coaching is designed to help facilitate professional and personal development to the point of individual growth, improved performance and contentment. Most important, the coach attempts to stimulate the client’s self-discovery by posing powerful questions and/or assigning homework that may take the form of “thought experiments” with written product or “field experiments” which are actions to try in the real world that may result in experiential learning and development of new approaches to situations. Coaches need to have a strong understanding of individual differences in a work place as well as the ability to adapt their coaching style or strategies. It is suggested that those coaches who are unable to acknowledge these differences will do more harm than good. Many executive coaches have a specific area of expertise: sports; business or psychology. Regardless of specific area of focus, coaches still need to be aware of motivational needs and cultural differences.
Executive coaches work their clients towards specific professional goals. These include career transition, interpersonal and professional communication, performance management, organizational effectiveness, managing career and personal changes, developing executive presence, enhancing strategic thinking, dealing effectively with conflict, and building an effective team within an organization. An industrial organizational psychologist is one example of executive coaching.
Career Coaching
Career coaching focuses on work and career or issues around careers. It is similar in nature to career counseling and traditional counseling. Career coaching is not to be confused with life coaching, which concentrates on personal development. Another common term for a career coach is career guide, although career guides typically use techniques drawn not only from coaching, but also mentoring, advising and consulting. For instance, skills coaching and holistic counseling are increasingly of equal importance to careers guidance in the UK.
Coaching Ethics and Standards
One of the challenges in the field of coaching is upholding levels of professionalism, standards and ethics. To this end, many of the coaching bodies and organizations have codes of ethics and member standards and criteria according to which they hold their members accountable in order to protect coaching clients’ interests.
Mentorship
Mentorship is a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. The mentor may be older or younger, but have a certain area of expertise. It is a learning and development partnership between someone with vast experience and someone who wants to learn.
The person in receipt of mentorship may be referred to as a protégé (male), a protégée (female), an apprentice or, in recent years, a mentee. “Mentoring” is a process that always involves communication and is relationship based, but its precise definition is elusive. One definition of the many that have been proposed, is
Mentoring is a process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work, career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is perceived to have less (the protégé)”.
Mentoring in Europe has existed since at least Ancient Greek times. Since the 1970s it has spread in the United States of America mainly in training contexts and it has been described as “an innovation in American management”
Mentoring Techniques
The focus of mentoring is to develop the whole person and so the techniques are broad and require wisdom in order to be used appropriately. A 1995 study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business found that five most commonly used techniques among mentors were:
- Accompanying: making a commitment in a caring way, which involves taking part in the learning process side-by-side with the learner.
- Sowing: mentors are often confronted with the difficulty of preparing the learner before he or she is ready to change. Sowing is necessary when you know that what you say may not be understood or even acceptable to learners at first but will make sense and have value to the mentee when the situation requires it.
- Catalyzing: when change reaches a critical level of pressure, learning can escalate. Here the mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change, provoking a different way of thinking, a change in identity or a re-ordering of values.
- Showing: this is making something understandable, or using own example to demonstrate a skill or activity. You show what you are talking about, you show by own behavior.
- Harvesting: here the mentor focuses on “picking the ripe fruit”: it is usually used to create awareness of what was learned by experience and to draw conclusions. The key questions here are: “What have you learned?”, “How useful is it?”.
Different techniques may be used by mentors according to the situation and the mindset of the mentee, and the techniques used in modern organizations can be found in ancient education systems, from the Socratic technique of harvesting to the accompaniment method of learning used in the apprenticeship of itinerant cathedral builders during the Middle Ages. Leadership authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner advise mentors to look for “teachable moments” in order to “expand or realize the potentialities of the people in the organizations they lead” and underline that personal credibility is as essential to quality mentoring as skill.
Various types of mentors are
- Multiple Mentors: A new and upcoming trend is having multiple mentors. This can be helpful because we can all learn from each other. Having more than one mentor will widen the knowledge of the person being mentored. There are different mentors who may have different strengths.
- Profession or Trade Mentor: This is someone who is currently in the trade/profession you are entering. They know the trends, important changes and new practices that you should know to stay at the top of career. A mentor like this would be someone you can discuss ideas regarding the field, and also be introduced to key and important people that you should know.
- Industry Mentor: This is someone who doesn’t just focus on the profession. This mentor will be able to give insight on the industry as a whole. Whether it be research, development or key changes in the industry, you need to know.
- Organization Mentor: Politics in the organizations are constantly changing. It is important to be knowledgeable about the values, strategies and products that are within company, but also when these things are changing. An organization mentor can clarify missions and strategies, and give clarity when needed.
- Work Process Mentor: This mentor can speed quickly over the bumps, and cut through the unnecessary work. This mentor can explain the ‘ins and outs’ of projects, day to day tasks, and eliminate unnecessary things that may be currently going on in work day. This mentor can help to get things done quickly and efficiently.
- Technology Mentor: This is an up-and-coming, incredibly important position. Technology has been rapidly improving, and becoming more a part of day to day transactions within companies. In order to perform best, you must know how to get things done on the newest technology. A technology mentor will help with technical breakdowns, advise on systems that may work better than what you’re currently using, and coach you through new technology and how to best use it and implement it into daily life. These mentors are only examples. There can be many more different types of mentors. Look around workplace, life, and see who is an expert that you can learn something from.
Mentoring Relationships Types
There are two broad types of mentoring relationships: formal and informal. In addition to these broad types, there are also peer, situational, supervisory mentoring relationships. These tend to fall under the categories of formal and informal mentoring relationships. Informal relationships develop on their own between partners. Formal mentoring, on the other hand, refers to a structured process supported by the organization and addressed to target populations. Youth mentoring programs assist at-risk children or youth who lack role models and sponsors. In business, formal mentoring is part of talent management addressed to populations such as key employees, newly hired graduates, high potentials and future leaders. The matching of mentor and mentee is often done by a mentoring coordinator or by means of an (online) database registry.
There are formal mentoring programs that are values-oriented, while social mentoring and other types focus specifically on career development. Some mentorship programs provide both social and vocational support. In well-designed formal mentoring programs, there are program goals, schedules, training (for both mentors and protégés), and evaluation. In 2004 Metizo created the first mentoring certification for companies and business schools in order to guarantee the integrity and effectiveness of formal mentoring. Certification is attributed jointly by the organization and an external expert.
