HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT



Human Resource Development

Human Resource Development

Q: Critically examine the current issues(demographic changes, financial crisis, globalisation) impacting on the contribution of HRD at strategic and operational levels of an international business?

Ans: The study of the history of learning reveals that training and education of all types, whether academic or work related, are largely the products of economic and social conditions. Furthermore, human resource development (HRD) is a field with historical roots in both education and the world of work, and it is, first and foremost, a field of education that is for and about work (Swanson, 2007). Although the field of HRD has grown significantly since World War II, its historical origins cannot be separated from those of education and training (Marquardt, 2006).

Understanding of the current struggle surrounding HRD requires consideration of its history, underlying foundations, and conceptual frameworks. Some would say HRD has moved from the traditional to the contemporary or the modern to the postmodern. That depends upon one's perspective and one's view or definition of HRD practices (Hale, 2006).

Prior to the 1800s, individuals acquired knowledge or training in the home, on the job, or via an apprenticeship. The early 1800s witnessed development of, in today's terms, vocational education and technical schools. Furthermore, the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 firmly established vocational education in the public school system; thus began the shift of training from home to schools. Passage of the Morrill Land Grant act of 1862, for example, was influenced by the need for a system to train mechanics for complex farm machinery. Institutions of higher education were now in position and called upon to train workers for the industrial economy (Goleman, 2006).

The components of HRD are results and focus. Results are measured in the short-term, generally from 1 day to 1 year, or the long-term, beyond 1 year, while the focus of HRD is either on the individual employee or the organization.

Demographics and Globalization

Cross-cultural training, also referred to as multicultural counseling competence training, denotes the process of instructing psychologists-in-training to work effectively across cultures in their practice and research activities. The term cross-cultural (or multicultural) has been defined in the counseling psychology literature in two distinct ways. One definition of cross-cultural is broad and inclusive of a wide variety of reference group identities (e.g., race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social class). More traditional uses of the term, which emerged in the 1960s, were specific to different ethnicities, within and beyond the borders of the United States. On the basis of salience of race as a marker in the United States, many scholars during the 1980s and 1990s argued for a more specific definition of cross-cultural (multicultural) that focuses on domestic racial, ethnic, and linguistic minority groups. Because there has been increased attention to international issues in the field of counseling psychology during recent years (for instance, three of the five presidents of the Society for Counseling Psychology between 2003 and 2007 positioned counseling psychology in a global sphere), cross-cultural, for the purposes of this entry, refers to race ...