Human Resource Development And Adult Learning In A Rapidly Changing Workplace Environment Essay.

Does It Conform To Adult Learning Perspective?

How To Do Turn Training And Development Into Business Results?

Challenges Faced by HRD Professionals

Human resource development is the process of unleashing the human expertise in the organization through development and personal training both in the organizational as well as individual levels. The HRD professional are responsible to provide expertise as well as tools for their employees so that they can learn and take initiative for addressing all work-related issues. Through different measures especially the adult workplace learning they can understand the rules and characteristics of the changes in the organization. This will ensure that the employees can undertake a systematic as well as sustained learning method and bring about changes in their acquired knowledge, values, attitude and skills (Strawn, 2015). However, in the recent workplace structure, the human resource management faces various employability issues which impact the knowledge and trainings of the adult employees which lead to creat issues in the human resource management. These challenging issues include Rapid changes in the technology, adjustment with the diverse workplace ambience and globalization. This essay will discuss the theoretical frame work of human resource development, adult learning models and the method of implication ion the organization.

Many of the industries are being affected due to some changes in the knowledge acquiring methods and subjects. In the customer-oriented industries in which the issues like aging workforce diversity of the workplace and technological changes are excessive can affect the most. These aspects continuously affect the production process and the relationship between the management and employees (Leberman & McDonald, 2016). Therefore, it can be suggested that the human resource development professionals need to assess the problem of these employees in responding to these forces prevalent in recent workplace settings. In order to increase their human capital as well as strengthen those human resource development professionals must help the adult learners to gain the knowledge along with skills so that they can possess individuality as a productive worker (Liu, 2016). With the change of workplace culture as well as technology due to globalization, the employees need to be more competitive so that their forms can gain competitive advantage in this Global competition. Proper investment in learning of these adult employees in the organization has become responsibility of these HRD in this changing nature of business. Hence there should be more changes in the learning processes and training methods of the adult learners of the organization so that the HRD can close the skill gaps among the workers by providing them Different kinds of skills and knowledge to face these challenges regarding production and service. In order to do so the employers, educators, public, policy makers and the employees need to work hand in hand.

Learning Theories for HRD

In this rapidly changing workplace environment, the instructional methods can guide the employees for being flexible as well as adaptive to these demands and mitigate the challenges. This will help to constantly acquire a new set of skills to cope with the recent technological changes. With the advancement in the information technology and its effect on the productivity and performance of the employees, the process of work has change. These have fundamentally changed the organization and adult education settings. These changes are forcing the unskilled laborers to eliminate the old skills and replace them with their acquired new information or knowledge to learn and remain in the workplace. For instance, the advancement of Robotics, CAD or CAM tools and the process control equipment necessitating the workers learn new type of skills and tools so that they can capture the main aspects to develop human resources and socio technological interplay of the system of the organization (Puteh, Kaliannan & Alam, 2015). On the other hand captures the main issues of the effective and efficient utilization of resources for meeting the productive goals in the comparative environment. The systems theory captures dynamic and complex interactions of the environment, work process, organizations and individual or group variables that operate at any point of times in the companies.

In order to strengthen the workforce by providing all the needed skills and information the HRD can follow some of the learning theories which can stimulate their workforce. These are reinforcement theories, social learning theories, goal theories, need theories, expectancy theory, adult learning theory and information process theory (Liu, 2016). These can help these employees to develop capacity along with skills to learn the importance of changes and how they will be able to cater these needs of changing nature of organization by fitting themselves. Through these learning’s they will feel self-fulfilled and effective. The constructivist perspective helps the learners to gain knowledge from their own experiences and reflection. Initially the behaviorist approach was dominant in the HRD as at that time individual performance and basically used to evaluate quantifiable and tangible financial outcomes of the organizations. However in this recent development of studies and technological use in the production of the companies the cognitive perspective, humanist perspective, constructivist perspective and transformative learning perspective have found relevant place in the field of HRD. This is due to the fact that with the financial resource measurements, the achievement of organizational goals has been added.

The Role of Educators in Adult Learning

In the recent organizations operating in global environment, the HRD has taken responsibility to provide all types of benefits of organizational learning process to their employees and aligned these with the strategic efficiencies of the firms. These highly developed learning programs have consequently reflected the immediate performance developments along with the other designed programs for various from of specific skills to improve the product of the firms. In addition to this the adult education has also spread in the broader spectrum that ranges from general educational development or GED classes to the cultural orientation program so that the employees can meet the requirements of the diverse cultures wherever the companies are operating (Kirwan, 2016).

In this changing environment the individual learning should be strategically connected with the organizational systems (Puteh, Kaliannan & Alam, 2015). In this regard the firms are also getting help from the government for generating necessary sources. Backed by the government, the business organizations are collaborating with the business teaching institutes so that they can exercise continue learning opportunities for both the adults and the HRD learners. The adult education shows the trainers’ capability to link the new knowledge into the existing knowledge of the learners as well as experiences.

According to the critics of organization learning process, the organizations aim to gain a cognitive growth (Pollock, Jefferson & Wick, 2015). For this reason, they are trying to eliminate most of the related challenges regarding employee education or trainings. With adult education, the behavioral changes have becoming mandatory for the companies as this will facilitate the humanist vision and gain human expertise. For this reason, the scholars are demonstrating learning process in two different aspects. Both these aspects are associated with the ability of the practitioners who will be the effective trainers in one hand and communicators along with facilitators on the other (Buckley & Ghauri, 2015). This is crucial to create the self directed and learner centered learning process the HRD professionals. They will create efficient trainers who will make changes in the individual needs and synthesize the efforts for meeting the common objectives.

In providing trainings to the adult learners, the HRD professionals and educators will be providing all the opportunities of self direction and reflection on their past experiences from which they will find the connection between their existing knowledge (Li, Kumar & Von Glinow, 2015). This will help them integrate new knowledge and easily mitigate the issues due these current changes. In order to make the learning more imperative, the practitioners can create open channel communications with these adult learners which will be free from threat. This can help them to further support to nurture and utilize their personal creativity. Through these methods the practitioners can motivate the learners and identify their own personal strengths and weaknesses to work on it.

Conclusion

In this learning process proper guidance of educators is needed as even the self directed learning process cannot take place in the complete isolation from the world where the learner leaves. It is closely associated to others where every learner gets affected by the interactions among one another and with the environment. It can be stated therefore the adult learning is not the result of vacuum (Anderson, 2016). They are initiated from the requirement of skills or the gap in the organizational process where the production and services need to be developed to match the advancement of current environment. Hence it can be stated that if the HRD professionals and the education help the adult learners of the organization they will be facilitated to gain different types of knowledge and help the production of the organizations.

Therefore, it can be concluded that the current business settings are constantly changing due to the inventions and development of technologies, growth of international consumers, cross cultural employees and demand of the markets. In this respect most of the employees of the firms feel challenged to meet the expectations of the customers so also the companies. This is the reason why they need to have proper knowledge about the process. From this gap in the knowledge the requirement of adult learning has originated. The highly progressive firms therefore, appointing educators to grow skills of their employees which are help their overall growth.

References:

Anderson, T. (2016). Theories for learning with emerging technologies. Emergence and innovation in digital learning: Foundations and applications, 35-50.

Buckley, P., & Ghauri, P. (2015). The eclectic paradigm as an envelope for economic and business theories of MNE activity. In International Business Strategy (pp. 74-98). Routledge.

Kirwan, C. (2016). Making sense of organizational learning: Putting theory into practice. Routledge.

Leberman, S., & McDonald, L. (2016). The transfer of learning: Participants' perspectives of adult education and training. Routledge.

Li, B., Kumar, M., & Von Glinow, M. A. (2015). Learning from the Globalization of an Emerging Economy Firm: Are Current Internationalization Theories Relevant?. In Experiences of emerging economy firms (pp. 170-203). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Liu, X. (2016). Motivation management of project-based learning for business english adult learners. International Journal of higher education, 5(3), 137.

Pollock, R. V., Jefferson, A., & Wick, C. W. (2015). The six disciplines of breakthrough learning: How to turn training and development into business results. John Wiley & Sons.

Puteh, F., Kaliannan, M., & Alam, N. (2015, February). Strategic Professional Development: Does it Conform to Adult Learning Perspective?. In ICMLG2015-The 3rd International Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance: ICMLG2015 (p. 316). Academic Conferences and Publishing Limited.

Strawn, J. (2015). Making Skills Everyone's Business: A Call to Transform Adult Learning in the United States. Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, US Department of Education.

van Harten, J., De Cuyper, N., Guest, D., Fugate, M., Knies, E., & Forrier, A. (2017). Special issue of international human resource management journal HRM and employability: an international perspective. The International Journal Of Human Resource Management, 28(19), 2831-2835. doi: 10.1080/09585192.2017.1377866