Employee development: the combination of formal education, job experiences, relationships, and
assessment of personality and abilities to help employees prepare for the future of their careers.
• Development is about preparing for change in the form of new jobs, new responsibilities, or
new requirements.
Table 1 Training vs Development
TRAINING
DEVELOPMENT
Focus
Current
Future
Use of work experiences
Low
High
Goal
Preparation for current job
Preparation for changes
Participation
Required
Voluntary
Protean career: a career that frequently changes based on changes in the person’s interests,
abilities, and values and in the work environment.
• To remain marketable, employees must continually develop new skills.
I. Formal Education
These may include:
– Workshops
– Short courses
– Lectures
– Simulations
– Business games
– Experiential programs
Many companies operate training and development centers.
II. Assessment
• Collecting information and providing feedback to employees about heir behavior,
communication style, or skills.
Table 2 Approaches to Employee Development
•
Information for assessment may come from the employees, their peers, managers,
and customers.
Assessment Tools:
1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)®
•
It is a psychological test that identifies individuals’ preferences for source of
energy, means of information gathering, way of decision making, and lifestyle,
providing information for team building and leadership development.
• This is the most popular test for employee development.
• The assessment consists of more than 100 questions about how the person feels
or prefers to behave in different situations.
2. Assessment Centers
• An assessment process in which multiple raters or evaluators (assessors) evaluate
employees’ performance on a number of exercises, usually as they work in a
group at an offsite location.
3. Benchmarks
• A measurement tool that gathers ratings of a manager’s use of skills associated
with success in managing