Introduction

Human resources development (HRD) refers to the vast field of training and development provided by organisations to increase the knowledge, skills, education, and abilities of their employees. Many employees come into an organisation with only a basic level of skills and experience and must receive training in order to do their jobs effectively. Others may already have the necessary skills to do the job, but don't have knowledge related to that particular organisation. HRD is designed to give employees the information they need to adapt to that organisation's culture and to do their jobs effectively.

In recent years, ideas and practices relating to HRD have moved beyond a narrow conception of training and development. Many organisations now claim to take a holistic view that embraces the idea of learning at individual and organisational levels as a crucial source of competitive advantage. HRD has attempted to move out of training departments into every aspect of organisational life as many organisations claim attraction to the idea of a learning organisation, with increasing moves towards finding ways to integrate work and learning.

Technology, global markets, customer expectations and competition have all contributed to the view that organisations need to achieve 'high-performance working', leading to the generation of high value-added products and services for customers, and trust and commitment from enthusiastic employees (International Labour Organisation, 2000). Key features of such an approach are the attention paid to learning throughout the organisation and the fact that learning is the only strategy to cope with change. There is a growing emphasis on viewing an organisation as a total learning system and finding its 'core competencies', which reveal its 'collective learning' (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990, p. 82). In addition, continuing advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have fostered an -learning movement, and accelerating change has stimulated a growing interest in organisation

learning and knowledge management, the development of an organisation's intellectual capital (Edvinsson and Malone, 1997) and the potential for learning between organisations. These are indeed powerful ideas that feed the message that learning is an obvious 'good thing', although some doubt whether this is always the case (Contu et al., 2003).

One important consequence is a growing interest in the profession of HRD and its theoretical development. After many years of low organisational awareness for their expertise (Gold et al., 2003), HRD practitioners now form a significant section of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in the UK, where they are able to present themselves as the experts in the development of knowledge, skills and learning, and as proactive in their approach to change (Mankin, 2001). Accompanying this growth, there has been more focus on the theoretical basis of HRD (Woodall, 2001), new journals and conferences being devoted to HRD as a separate discipline rather than a subdiscipline of HRM.



References

Contu, A., Grey, C. and Örtenblad, A. (2003) Against learning. Human Relations, 56(8): 931-52.

Edvinsson, L. and Malone, M. S. (1997) Intellectual Capital. London: Piatkus.

Gold, J., Rodgers, H. and Smith, V. (2003) What is the future for the human resource development professional? A UK perspective. Human Resource Development International, 6(4): 437-455.

International Labor Organization (2000) High performance working: research project overview. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employement/skills/training/casest/overivew.htm (accessed 15 March 2022).

Mankin, D. P. (2001) A model for human resource development. Human Resource Development International, 4(1): 65-85.

Prahalad, C. K. and Hamel, G. (1990) The core competencies of the corporation. Harvard Business Review, 68(May-June): 79-91.

Woodall, J. (2001) Editorial. Human Resource Development international, 4(3): 287-90.

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