Introduction
“Change was the story of the 20th century and will inevitable be the story of the 21st”…This implies that existing and new staff will need to acquire new knowledge, skills, attitudes and perspectives on a continual basis.” Training is “a planned and systematic effort to modify or develop knowledge/skill/attitude through learning experience, to achieve effective performance in an activity or range of activities. Its purpose, in the work situation, is to enable an individual to acquire abilities in order that he or she can perform adequately a given task or job” (Buckley and Caple, 2000, p.xiii-1). Cowling and Mailer (1998:65) point out that without a well-planned systematic approach to training, what is learned may not be what is best for the organization. The ‘systematic training cycle’ (Figure 1) shows “a circular process of identifying and analyzing a spectrum of training needs, planning and designing training, delivering training events, monitoring and evaluating their outcomes and effectiveness, and feeding the results of that evaluation into ongoing identification of needs (Harrison,1997:39).”
Figure 1 Systematic Training Cycle
Armstrong (2001:548) described “a systematic training is training which is specifically designed to meet defined needs. It is planned and provided by people who know how to train and the impact of training is carefully evaluated.” According to Figure 1, the aim of this essay is to evaluate the relevance of training needs analy ...