Before we go on to the details of the training activities of various IT organizations, we shall define the basics.
Training: Effort initiated by an organization to foster learning among its members. It tends to be narrowly focused and oriented toward short-term performance concerns.
Development: Effort that is oriented more toward broadening an individual’s skills for the future responsibilities.
The Systems Approach to Training and Development
Phase 1: Needs assessment for training. It consists of three parts- organizational, task and person analysis.
• Organizational analysis: An examination of the environment, strategies, and resources of the organization to determine where training emphasis should be placed.
• Task Analysis: The process of determining what the content of a training program should be on the basis of a study of the tasks and duties involved in the job.
• Person Analysis: A determination of the specific individuals who need training.
Phase 2: Designing the training program. Instructional Objectives represent the desired outcomes of a training program (Performance-centered objectives). They also provide a basis for choosing methods and materials and for selecting the means for assessing whether the instruction will be successful. Trainee readiness and motivation can be created by using positive reinforcement, eliminating threats and punishments, being flexible, have participants set personal goals, designing interesting instructions and break down other physical and psychological obstacles to learning. The principles of learning should include goal setting, individual differences, active practice and repetition, whole versus part learning, masses versus distributed learning, feedback and reinforcement, meaningfulness of presentation and modeling.
Phase 3: Implementing the training. This stage involves taking decisions like nature of training, types of training and organizational extent of training. The