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Employee training and learning have transformed over the years. The movement from classroom training to the blended format represents the magnitude of this evolution. This has placed much attention on self-regulated learning. This study aimed to understand the individual and organizational mechanisms that sustain the formal learning process in organizations. It explored the goals the organizations and employees strive to achieve by investing in learning. Through this, the authors investigated how technology assistance makes learning more goal-oriented, despite the possibility of different goals for different stakeholders. They also examined how person-job fit can be achieved in employee training.

The study adopted a grounded theory-based inductive approach using a qualitative inquiry that used in-depth interviews of employees working in the Indian IT/ITES sector. This sector is knowledge-intensive and engages in constant skill development. A content analysis of the interview transcripts unraveled the most relevant themes from the participants' discussion.

Individual learners use dimensions of self-regulated learning to set and achieve goals such as better performance and career development. On the other hand, organizations use learning support mechanisms such as better access and flexibility to direct employee learning behavior to achieve organizational goals. Focusing on goal congruence leads to better achievement of results. Goal congruence also implies good person-organization fit.

This research established how aligning individual and organizational mechanisms can help achieve training goals that ultimately contribute to organizational performance. The study differentiated itself by investigating training goal setting and goal achievement at two levels – organizational and individual – using a qualitative approach. It also showed how goal congruence is vital in improving organizational performance and how technology-enabled training practices rely on self-regulated learning and help achieve goal congruence.

The extreme measures that have been taken by governments across the globe to minimize the spread of COVID-19 have had significant impacts on almost all the public sectors, especially on the economy and education. This study aims to address the approaches and prospective of online-based training and e-learning for employee learning and development during this COVID-19 crisis.

With an emphasis on the qualitative approach and considering the complex COVID-19 emergency, required data were collected from in-depth interviews to interpret the experiences of the respondents.

The findings suggested that the digital learning ecosystem offered flexibility of time, place and pace, which provided essential convenience during the COVID-19 crisis. From the human resource (HR) perspective, the e-learning culture has enabled the organizations to quickly adopt the new normal, secure sustainable continuity of organizational development and ensure decent work and growth within and across organizations. The adoption of e-learning and flexible working conditions following the setback has enabled the organizations to quickly cope up with the new normal, causing a significant paradigm shift in the organizational culture and corporate sector of Bangladesh.

The study will assist the HR of any organization to contemplate e-learning systems as effective alternative training methods. Also, the study will be suggestive to traverse new dimensions and skillsets for the pedagogues.

This study offers new evidential scenarios regarding the emergence of effective e-learning initiatives and online-based learning programs for developing the workforce to be efficient and productive even in distressful and inconvenient COVID-19 situations.

The study examined the impact of feedback types through a learning management system (LMS) on employees’ training performance. The purpose of this study is to establish effective feedback on advanced technologies for promoting corporate training.

A total of 148 trainees were recruited from a multinational medical company. Employees were randomly assigned to receive feedback from shallow to more constructive details on their learning performance with LMS. Data sources included are employees’ goal setting (GS) performance evaluated by the experts and their posttest scores obtained from the LMS. A series of statistical analyses were performed to investigate the impact of feedback intervention on employees’ GS and their impacts on corporate training results.

GS has a significant impact on learning outcomes. Employees who set greater specific goals attained higher scores. Furthermore, feedback with more formative evaluation and constructive developmental advice resulted in the most significant positive influence on the relationship between participants’ GS and learning outcomes.

Organizations can benefit from delivering appropriate feedback using LMS to enhance employees’ GS and learning efficacy in corporate training.

This study is one of the first to examine the moderating effect of feedback provided by LMS on GS and online learning performance in corporate training. This study contributes to GS theory for practical application and proposes a viable method for remote learning. The current study’s findings can be used to provide educational psychological insights for training and learning in industrial contexts.

This paper aims to investigate barriers to employee participation in voluntary formal training and development opportunities from the perspective of employees in small engineering businesses.

An exploratory qualitative methodology involving data collection via site visits and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 20 employees in five small engineering businesses was used. Interviews explored the role of developmental proactivity and employees’ perceptions of conditions in the immediate work environment and industry sector that represent barriers to their participation in formal training and development. Interview transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis.

Three key findings are as follows. First, proactive behaviour regarding access to external training and development is muted in small business settings because of strong resource allocation norms. Second, factors in the internal work environment rather than the industry sector constitute the major barriers to training and development. Third, owner-managers and employees appear to have significantly differing perspectives of barriers to training and development.

The findings suggest avenues for future research. These include examining how workplace norms influence employee behaviour with regard to accessing formal training and development and investigating the learning strategies that employees use to compensate for a lack of access to training and development.

Research into relatively low levels of employee participation in formal training and development in small businesses is deficient because it predominantly involves surveys of owner-managers’ opinions. This study is novel because it seeks to generate new insights not previously articulated by employees. The study yielded four propositions that have practical and research implications.

This study examines the factors that hinder employee training and learning in the automotive industry in Ghana, Africa.

The study adopts quantitative research methodology and cross-sectional survey design. Eighty-nine usable questionnaires from employees of an automotive organization in Ghana are used. Descriptive statistics and one-sample t-test are used for the analyses.

The results indicate that organizational culture, poor management commitment to training, inadequate promotion prospects, and lack of transparency and fairness in trainees’ selection are the most common barriers to employee training and learning.

Top management should provide opportunities to employees to apply new skills and knowledge they acquired. Fair and transparent procedures should be used to select training beneficiaries. Finally, organizations should develop cultural systems that encourage continuous learning motivation among their employees.

In this era of knowledge-driven economy, this research highlights factors that inhibit employees’ motivation to learn.

This chapter discusses key training challenges that organizations need to confront with the objective of building a robust human resource management system. Given the dynamics of the current business environment, training and development has become an indispensable function in global organizations. Building an effective human capital that contributes to continual organizational growth has become the established norm to survive in a competitive business landscape. However, the training and development function is often rendered ineffective, on account of various bottlenecks existing in the organization. Addressing these bottlenecks is quintessential in ensuring the creation of a performance-driven human capital. The goal of this chapter is to draw attention to the training impediments that hinder organizational growth and to diagnose the underlying causes for the same. This chapter concludes with recommendations that organizational decision-makers can leverage in their quest to strengthen the human capital, by utilizing their training and development infrastructure optimally.

Older workers represent an increasingly important source of labour for organisations. Irrespective of age, a worker needs the appropriate skills and knowledge to be productive and to help the organisation achieve its strategic objectives. However, in many organisations, older workers are less likely to be offered training opportunities than their younger compatriots. This is due, in part, to negative stereotypical assumptions about older workers by managers. Learning and training are influenced by an individual’s career span and motivation. As a person ages, their work-related needs will change. There is a shift from growing and developing their career to a focus on security, maintenance, emotional satisfaction and mastery. Cognitive change takes place during a person’s life, and a gradual decline in primary mental abilities can be expected, but the notions of general decline are simplistic and misleading. A person is able to learn at any age and the older worker is capable of adjusting to changes in work. Many people assume that older workers are homogeneous but this is not the case. There are significant differences between older workers and these differences need to be acknowledged and understood. The organisational culture will affect learning and training opportunities for older workers, as will the attitudes of managers to older employees. Learning and training for older workers will also be influenced by the national culture and, in this chapter, selected Asian countries are discussed. The chapter concludes by offering recommendations regarding learning and training for older workers in organisations.

This paper aims to complement an earlier article (2010) in Journal of European Industrial Training in which the description and theory bases of scenistic methods were presented. This paper also offers a description of scenistic methods and information on theory bases. However, the main thrust of this paper is to describe, give suggested uses for, and then to examine the empirical research already conducted on three scenistic methods: skill charting, case‐based modeling and performance templates. The thrust of the research review is to examine the efficacy of each of the three methods.

Following the descriptive information regarding scenistic methods in‐general, each of the three specific methods (see above) are explained in detail as they might be used in training practice. Then, for each method, samples of the extant empirical research attendant to the method is examined.

With regard to the empirical research presented in the paper it is found that in most practical applications of the methods, employees trained with scenistic methods out‐perform employees trained with more conventional methods on some if not most of the variables under examination. The findings demonstrate that scenistic methods clearly have promise, although statistical precision is compromised owing to small sample sizes.

Studying the effects of different forms of training in these studies is constrained because the very nature and design of scenistic training approaches limits the number of trainees that can be included in a group. In brief, this means that results of use of conventional statistical tools demonstrate less sensitivity to group‐to‐group differences in performance. It is much easier to demonstrate statistical significance if comparing large groups of 60 or more individuals, each. Regardless, comparisons of groups in the reported studies demonstrate significant differences in performance following training on most variables.

Overall, scenistic methods show much promise for use by training practitioners as the available empirical research, in the field, demonstrates their value.

The paper groups together the findings of use of a variety of scenistic methods of training. There has been practically no research reported in recent years of the efficacy of methods such as these that use cases, incidents, stories, etc. to ground training and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed, theoretical underpinning for the training and performance improvement method: performance template (P‐T). The efficacy of P‐T, with limitations, has been demonstrated in this journal and in others. However, the theoretical bases of the P‐T approach had not been well‐developed. The other purposes of this paper are to: explain the features and functions of the P‐T and to highlight the action theory of Frese as the theory supports P‐T and offers trainers some information regarding the regulation of feedback and learning. This paper adds to the procedures and practices of human resource development.

The approach in this paper is to explain how a training and development partnership among trainers, managers, and employees is forged so as to create P‐T for use in the field. The main aspect of the methodology was to attempt to map the elements of action theory onto the specific steps (phases) of the P‐T approach. This mapping activity was achieved.

The key findings in this study is that action theory offers a hierarchical and reasonably complete explanation of how learning occurs and how individuals regulate what they know. As explained in this paper action theory provides a map of the cognitive elements in the training model employed.

Assuming that the P‐T approach has value, it is important to demonstrate how theory helps to ground the approach. In this paper, action theory has been used to offer a substantial foundation for the P‐T approach. In addition, action theory helps trainers to examine learning, feedback, and regulation of performance in a comprehensive manner.

Action theory offers several features that help explain the regulation of learning and behavior, yet the theory has received very little attention in formal literatures. Value: the template approach adds to our repertoire of training methods. This paper helps to better explain the approach and it offers useful theories to support practice.

The aim of this article is to describe the scenistic approach to training with corresponding activities and the theory bases that support the approach.

Presented is the definition of the concept of scenistic training along with the step‐by‐step details of the implementation of the approach. Scenistic methods, while clear examples of situated cognition and learning, are derived from several other important theory bases to include constructivism, experiential learning, mental models, transformative learning, and action theory.

The theory base offers support for the activities and steps contained in scenistic training methods. The theories, in combination, address motivation, distinct learning tasks and activities, and the regulation of learning. To an extent, scenistic methods invite the trainee to create and manage learning with guidance and support from trainers. This delegation of responsibility to the trainee has powerful motivational consequences.

In this article a detailed presentation of the concepts and theories that support the development and use of scenistic training methods is offered. Even though the efficacy of scenistic methods are supported with empirical research, the theory‐base for the methods has not been carefully explained.

Most of the development of scenistic methods has taken place in the past ten years, a time period in which there has not been a lot of interest displayed in new training approaches. This article seeks to illuminate the concept for practitioners and scholars of training as well as to offer detailed theory grounding for scenistic methods.

Originality and value are combined in the expression of the details of a somewhat generic model of scenistic methods as well as a reasonably broad perspective of theories that help to explain the dynamics of the steps in the approach.