The nature of work and the structure of organizations are rapidly changing. The learning, training and development of employees is now center stage in today’s organization to ensure long term competitiveness, excellence, quality, flexibility and adaptability. The strategic importance of individual and organizational learning and development is mirrored in the continued interests in the concepts of the organizational learning. The role of the Employee Learning and Development (ELD) is to promote and support employee and organizational growth, development and empowerment by providing innovative, quality workplace learning programs, resources and services.
Learning is defined as the process of assimilating new knowledge and skills in consequence of experience or practice that will bring about relatively permanent changes in behavior. Effective learning necessitates a capacity to integrate new knowledge with existing knowledge (Learning, 2007). Development is a continuous process of systematic advancement of “becoming increasingly more complex, more elaborate and differentiated, by virtue of learning and maturation” (Collin, 2007, p.266).
Employee Learning and Development (ELD) systems is the system that plan and observe the employee training, career development and the employee’s performance. As well as analyze the employee career development, ELD systems also recommend training programs and periodic performance appraisal. There are several purposes of ELD systems, which is;
- Improve and correct an employee’s performance and the organization’s itself.
- Training programs increase the employee’s knowledge, skill and attitudes towards their current work.
- Development programs where the program conducts in order to preparing the employees with their future work.
- To ensure the employees can keep on competitiveness and well perform in their work.
- Help the employee manage their stress due to work overload.
Figure: The component of Employee Learning and Development (ELD) Systems
ELD systems can be classified in five components, which is employee personal information, performance before training, training course, training transfer and program evaluation. Employee personal information is the personal background about employee such as staff ID, name of the employee, age, address, position in company and others. Performance before training also can be describes as the employee education, performance level and how the employee develops their job responsibility before they attend any training. It can be checked based on the employee’s Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Training course is information that the employee need to know like course code, course name, module, date of training, subject matter expert (SME), training methods and length of course. Next, training transfer how the knowledge in training transfer to participants, either transfer through knowledge development, forum, video conference, outdoor skill training or others types of training transfer. The last component is program evaluation. Evaluation looks at the total value of that training event and process, thereby placing it into its organizational context and aiding future planning. Faced in an evaluation task, there are four crucial questions to answer: why, who, when and how in evaluating the method, transfer of training and results based on the training objectives. (Harrison, 2005, p.143). Kirkpatrick (1960) also suggest four levels of outcomes that should be evaluated: reaction, learning, behavior and results. Summative, formative and learning are several purpose of evaluation. The summative evaluation has quantitative in nature that establishes whether training and development program was effective, efficient, has added value and met its objectives. The formative evaluation includes qualitative in nature and assesses how training, learning and development that can be improved that is, how they could be made more efficient and effective. In sum, learning explained quantitative and qualitative assessment of learner’s post-training performance to evaluate whether learning transfer has occurred.
The advantages of ELD system are cost effective and accessibility helps to empowerment and facilitation and improved computer skills. Whether the disadvantages of ELD system are lack of human contact, need employees to know the computer basic skills and certain contents are not suitable to employees. In conclusion, the ELD system can help make the process easier to implement, facilitate timely information sharing and enabling a consistent coordination between elements and the organization.
REFERENCES
Collin, A. (2007). Learning and development. In J. Beardwell & T. Claydon (Eds.), Human resource management: A contemporary approach (5th ed.). Harlow, UK: Prentice Hall, Financial Times.
Harrison, R. (2005). Learning and development. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1960). Techniques for evaluating training programmes. Journal of the American Society for Training and Development, 14, 13-18, 25-32.
