Introduction

A successful organization is built on satisfied and trained employees. They are the company’s greatest assets. Employee development is defined as formal education, on-the-job training, previous job experience, personality mapping, and improvement in the current skill sets as to prepare the employee for future.

A trained and developed staff will contribute to productivity increase, improved profitability and significant increase in the market share. Therefore, it is very important for companies to design and maintain efficient training/development systems for employees.

An employee development system consists of induction, training, development, periodic counseling, performance appraisal and career management. This system is deployed to ensure that employees are able to perform the task they have been hired for and are competent to make career progression along with it.

Training and Development

Training and development are different from each other. The focus of training is short term while for development, it is long term. The utilization of work experience is low in training and high in development. The aim of training is preparation for current assignment while development looks at upcoming assignment. Employee participation is voluntary in training while it is mandatory in development.

Importance of Training and Development

An employee development system ensures alignment between employee’s potential and organizational expectation. There are various approaches to ensure this alignment.

1. The 1^st approach is to inform an employee about his expectation and his progress towards the goal.

2. The 2^nd approach is to improve the employee’s ability through continuous training.

3. The 3^rd approach is to assign responsibility to each stakeholder in employee’s development and make them accountable.

The aim of employee development is not only to make them progress in their career but also to train them as per company’s requirement.

Training and Development System

The key features of training system are as follows:

• Training management systems is developed to ensure that all training requirements of organization are effectively managed.

• Employee management modules of the system help manager design and develop a training calendar as per the employee’s requirement.

• Employee management module automatically prepares a list of employees as per upcoming development sessions.

• Employee management module also helps in preparing the progress sheet for employees.

The development system is not only restricted to online tools but also includes various policies and procedures. The comprehensive development system helps the coaching staff continuously asses’ progress of employee but also effectiveness of the development session. The development system consists of software, hardware and company’s development policies.

Employee Development Tools

Employee development tools are also important part of training management system. 360-degree feedback system helps to improve employee performance by gathering feedback from various sources like peers, managers, customers, colleagues, etc. The feedback is anonymous in nature and should be used as a developmental tool rather than as an administrative tool.

Companies should identify high-performing development system before investing in it. They should continuously strive to improve developmental systems. They are possibilities that exiting system, session and procedure may become monotonous in long term there by affecting employee motivation.

One of biggest employer fear is that post training employees would look for employment change and hence they do not encourage training. Though this concern is valid in some cases, but overall it has shown that trained employee show better motivation level and loyalty.