Training & Development or Training vs. Development?

In the training domain, the tendency is to be increasingly oriented towards concrete results; for this reason, training is increasingly linked to employee and business performance.
Also employee development programs continuously evolve: today they mainly focus on the soft skills that allow employees to grow personally and professionally, in order to to really developing their skills and potential.
So, when an organization treat “training” and “development” as a single practice, every move towards one can undermine the other.

Results-oriented training

Training can have short or medium term goals. Usually, when a company identifies a business problem and determines that among the causes there is the behaviour or a deficit of skills of the employees, it starts specific training programs aimed at changing behaviour. However, the new tools we have available today are changing these logics: today we have a more robust set of tools to link training activities to business results. We can collect detailed data on how employees interact and perform training, then correlate them with data on business results and employee performance, and identify missing points to improve them.

Development driven by empowered employees

Development programs include longer-term objectives than training. Rather than focusing on a specific gap, development aims to encourage employees to grow. Unlike performance-driven training, development is increasingly shifting towards an employee-centred approach, so that they can trace their professional and personal path.

To meet the needs of the modern employee, organizations are currently in a period of intense experimentation to enable and assist learning throughout the organization, anywhere and at any time. For this reason, methodologies and approaches to empower the self-learning are today experimented and adopted: a combination of tools based on research, Artificial Intelligence, social networks connected to work systems already known by employees. The ultimate goal is to enable the employee to acquire knowledge and develop their skills wherever and whenever they want or need it.

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