LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

An organization is responsible for ensuring that its employees have the suitable skills, knowledge to satisfy the organization’s strategic and operational objectives. There are many different ways that employees can be developed including induction, on the job training, internal courses, external courses, workshops, mentoring and coaching. This has obvious implication for recruitment; however it also additionally involves a commitment to learning and development by the organization to ensure that skills and knowledge are maintained and developed to ensure ongoing competitiveness and adaptability.

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Learning and Development basically deals with the achievement of understanding how techniques and practices works in an organization. In fact, learning and development is one of the essential processes of human resource management as it can improve performance of an employee and it grows employee’s capacity to take action. Organizations are now gradually implementing more process on employees’ organizational learning and development. (Tahir et al., 2014)

A learning and development strategy is designed to support the success of business objectives by promoting the human capital advantage. It should be business and people-led, which means taking in relation the needs and aspiration of employee to grow and develop. Learning and development strategy is underpinned by a philosophical system and its function is to operationalize that philosophy. It is fundamentally concerned with creating a learning culture that will encourage learning and will provide the basis for planning and implementing learning activities and programmes. (Armstrong, 2009)

Learning and development is the process of gaining and developing knowledge, skills, behaviors and attitudes through learning or experiences. Strategic L&D is an approach to help employee to learn and develop, which is concerned with how the organization’s goals will be achieved through its human resources of incorporated L&D strategies, policies and practices. Strategic L&D aims to produce a logical and wide-range structure for developing employee through the creation of a learning culture and the formulation of organizational and individual learning strategies. Learning and development strategies are the active components of an overall approach to strategic L&D. They express the organization’s intentions on how L&D activities will take place in the organization and provide guidance on how these activities should be planned and implemented. (Armstrong and Taylor, 2014)

INTERNATIONAL PRACTICES

Stedfast Inc executed a skills and learning facility to wind up the point of convergence of the company's on the job skills development activities. The Transportation Security Administration in United States grew new rules for the learning of baggage screeners and flight crews and made airport security completely federalized. Canadian organizations send employees on task in foreign countries since they have to give them culturally diverse preparing so they will have the capacity to adjust and work in an alternate culture. (Saks and Haccoun, 2010)

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

Learning and development influences employees' performance and organizational capability, which concludes that an action must be taken to guarantee that employees' skills and knowledge are completely underutilized through sufficient and convenient learning outline and implementation. It is subsequently prescribed that Individual should be more proactive and try to be more innovative and creative to contribute their portion through their profession and skills. Employers of the workforce should try to make empowering learning condition and great learning approaches that will give each employee a chance to learn. Management should also take into the consideration the learning need of every employee and act as fitting. (Falola, Osibanjo and Ojo, 2014)

REFERENCES

Armstrong, M. (2009) Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, 11^th edn. London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page.

Armstrong, M. and Taylor, S. (2014) Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resource Management, 13th edn. London: Kogan Page.

Falola, H. O., Osibanjo, A. O. and Ojo, S. I. (2014) ‘Effectiveness of Training and Development on Employees Performance and Organization Competitiveness in the Nigerian Banking Industry’, Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov, 7(56), pp. 162-170.

Saks, A. M. and Haccoun, R. R. (2010) Managing Performance Through Training and Development, 5^th edn. United States of America: Nelson Education.

Tahir, N., Yousafzai, I. K., Jan, S. and Hashim, M. (2014) ‘The Impact of Training and Development on Employees Performance and Productivity A case study of United Bank Limited Peshawar City, KPK, Pakistan’, International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 4(4), pp. 86-98.