Training Professionals Have a Leading Role in Innovation and Change.

Management is a fundamental and broad area of business reality today. Effective management practices can lead to organizational success. For organizations to best achieve this success, they need to be receptive to innovation and change. With these as objectives in mind, it becomes apparent that training professionals can play a leading role. Change (in a business context) can basically mean the management to ‘plan, initiate, realize, control, and stabilize’ change on both, corporate and personal level (Recklies 2011), while innovation is defined by Sylver (2011) as a mean the introduction of something new that makes something better than it was before. Training professionals are those people who help companies use the most out of their workforce, whether they need to receive training or not (Armson 2008). The purpose of this essay is to successfully explain the leading role that training professionals have in innovation and change. Nowadays, the role of a training professional is to successfully come up with a program that will improve the performance of a certain work group with the best practices to lead towards innovation and change (Miller 2010). Having the right skills to professionally develop someone is essential of the training professionals. As mentioned by Training and Development (2008), professional development is essentially an organized ‘maintenance, improvement and broadening of knowledge and skills’ as well as the personal development of one’s qualities to the level that is necessary to maintain relevance and effectiveness. Generally, it is fundamental that training professionals help the organization’s workers learn all that they need in order to know how to get their job done (Poell, Van Der Krogt, Vermulst, Harris & Simons, 2011). Having the right approach is a fundamental step for training professionals to successfully deliver their training and development programs. Firms, nowadays, make considerable effort to efficiently succeed on training their employees. For instance, one of the first steps of training that Mc Donalds US company brings to its new employees is to attend a class called ‘Hamburger U’ – which is now known as ‘ â€Å"Bachelor of Hamburgerology† ’ – so that they can fully understand the firm’s culture and produce a more efficient work (Nation’s Restaurant News 2005). It is also important that training professionals approach carefully to their superiors, as they might need some training or guidance as well. Furthermore, an interesting approach that can be used to train people is to simply not train people. By that, it means that having a training program might not always necessarily be needed measure for performance improvement or change. There are a lot more factors than just the lack of skill that can influence a worker. Asking questions, as Nick Miller (2010) said, about ‘motivation, purpose, end goal, leading indicators, and performance obstacles’ are a really important step to fully know if training is actually needed or not. This is also missed most time due to the lack of relationship between the superiors and the general workers. It is essential that organizations develop innovation into their training and development programs. ANZ Bank focuses its training in four main points: ‘Learning for leadership and talent’ where they help leaders develop their leadership skills; ‘Core banking skills’ where the bank aims to train its employees to develop the necessary technical skills to be able to satisfy their customers; ‘Organizational culture and values’ where it aims to improve social interaction and a deeper knowledge of cultures and finally ‘Learning infrastructure’ where the focus is on ensuring that everyone gets the training that they need (ANZ 2011). The company itself focuses their four points all so that they can bring out the best of its employees towards its customers. Crown is another huge company who has its own training program that is also aimed at their employees. In fact, they have their own college called ‘Crown College’ (HC Online 2011) where employees undergo training to improve themselves. Crown College has a partnership with Swinburne University for its extensive efficient management training programs. As Crown’s human resources executive general manager Peter Coyne (HC Online 2011) mentioned: ‘ â€Å"Employees might start down the Certificate pathway and then step into a Diploma of Business, which can be converted into a degree at Swinburne at some point in the future† ’, this shows that crown focuses its main training facility for a younger age group and that the firm, as mentioned by Peter Coyne (HC Online 2011), trains younger people who got work in crown that had ‘limited success in secondary school’ (HC Online 2011) to change their mindsets from having a job in this epartment of hospitality to turn it into a life time career. ANZ and Crown are two companies that belong to different industries. ANZ is a bank and gets its income mainly from their clients that keep their money there, whereas Crown is a Hotel/Casino where it earns its income from a broad area of hospitality and from gambling itself. Similarly, both firms bring out the most of its employees for one goal: customer satisfaction. Both firms might belong to different industries, but both need customers in order to survive. ANZ needs their money in the bank and Crown needs them for the casino and hotel as well. They both provide services to their customers and the degree of how satisfied the customers are is a really important point for both firms. On the other hand, ANZ focuses its training on people with a good base education that also have high years of experience in the field (ANZ 2011) and Crown aims its training towards the younger age group who doesn’t have much experience as well as studies. In conclusion, various sources believe that the role of Training Professionals is essential for business success, because these people can provide a competitive advantage. Approaches taken by Training Professionals tend to vary, but their common objective is to lead an organization into the level where the business becomes more efficient so that it meets the leaders goals and expectations. In my opinion, training professionals might be under rated. Not much people would even think of it as an option for their careers, but this role is so important for an organization because of its unlimited potential of improving any whatsoever department of the company. References Miller, N 2010, ‘Leading workplace innovation and change: brave new role’, T+D, vol. 64, no. 6, pp. 54-58 Poell, R F, Van der Krogt, F J, Vermulst, A A, Harns, R, Simons, M 2006, ‘Roles of informal workplace trainers in different organisational contexts: empirical evidence from Australian companies’, Human Resource Development Quarterly, vol 17, no. 2, pp. 175-198. 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