PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN

Professional and Personal Development Plan

Professional and Personal Development Plan

Part 1

Introduction

Training and development is a process that begins with the orientation of a new employee and continues throughout an employee's career. It is important that the human resource manager develop training programs to improve employee skills and performance in a changing workforce. This paper will use five-steps to define and develop an appropriate training program for ABC Bank. The five steps to be addressed will be needs assessment, design, development and implementation, and evaluation.

Needs Assessment

The initial step in any training program is to identify training needs. The organization must identify what training is needed through a needs assessment. The three categories are organizational analysis, job task analysis, and individual analysis (Mathis & Jackson 2006 214-354).

Organizational analysis looks at the training needs from within the organization. Are the organizations goals and visions being achieved? What will the needs and skills employees will need in order to meet the organizations' expectations now and in the future? The human resource manager must identify and develop criteria to evaluate training outcomes. Job task analysis is the process of discovering and evaluating tasks to be trained for. The human resource manager will evaluate the requirements each position requires and compare the requirements to the employees' ability to fully execute the required duties. Job task analysis determines what and how training should be accomplished.

Individual analysis is the process of evaluating how a person performs his or her specific job function (Wells 2007 101-123). Individual analysis identifies employees who require training for promotions. This type of analysis determines if the employee has the skills and knowledge to advance within the organizations. Individual analysis can also determine the appropriate training for employees who lack certain skills and require additional training (Noe Hollenbeck Gerhart & Wright 2004 248-311).

One of the first steps of effective training is to uncover each employee's current skill set. The next step is to find out which skills and knowledge of the job the employee needs training. Organizations such as ABC Bank do pre-employment tests for each prospective employee, then during the course observations are made to see where they stand in that particular course. This determines what amount of training and coaching is needed for that employee. Another way that ABC Bank assesses training needs is through direct observation. Managers may observe performance deficiencies while watching an employee do his or her job and recommend a particular online training class. Changes in policy, procedure, regulations, and products can also necessitate training (Katz Carter Bishop & Kravitz 2004 41-62).

Design

The second step in a training program is to develop objectives and criteria. The objectives and criteria describe the performance in terms of the training program. The objectives are very important, as they are a road map for trainers by providing specific topics and content to focus on. Once the training objectives are defined the training plan begins (Polk 2006 23-30).

ABC Bank has produced and implemented multiple training models to measure the capabilities of ...