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The British visit of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka underlines the rise of Japan's industrial might. Japanese management training, closely linked with the country's unique culture, has played a key role in the industrial success. Raymond Brown reports.

Craft training in hotels and catering A valuable contribution to the debate on the relevance of further education courses to the industry is made by the publication of two reports by the Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board. The Craft Career is a summary of the findings of a survey covering a sample of former students who obtained City & Guilds qualifications in 1975. Apart from courses in cookery, where about a third of the students were on part‐time and day release, all but a very small number had studied full‐time. Most students found employment in the industry without much difficulty, mainly by answering advertisements or by direct approach to employers. Nearly 80 per cent of males found their first job in private sector employment; more than 50 per cent of females obtained their first job in the public sector. A large proportion of those leaving college took junior positions, often in areas for which their qualifications did not appear to be the most suitable, and women were even less likely than men to start in high‐status jobs or to obtain early promotion. Students who had been HCITB registered trainees fared substantially better than others. The general conclusions derived from the survey are that courses are considered both by students and employers to be insufficiently related to the realities of the working situation and that, as time goes on, there may be an increasing polarisation between, on the one hand, highly skilled craft workers requiring experience and development as well as college‐based training and, on the other hand, a larger number of workers at operative level whose training might be carried out more effectively in the work situation.

Stanley Alderson takes a critical look at proposals for improving the effectiveness of industry's training officers, following the collapse of a formal introductory training scheme set up in the mid‐sixties.

Interest in management development is mushrooming. The number of articles which address different aspects of it are likewise increasing apace. This has heightened the need for a broad‐based review which will pull the material together, give shape to it, evaluate it and draw out its implications. In this, the first of a two‐part article, this task is commenced.

There has been a surge in interest in public management development in the 1980s. Countries that had no management development programmes introduced new ones, while countries already having such programmes made far‐reaching changes to them. Initiatives have been costly precisely at a time when most governments have had to exercise restraint in their spending. Suggests that governments should have in place rigorous evaluation plans to assess if the programmes are successful. Reviews the evaluation efforts of several countries in public management development programmes. The study reveals that the evaluation record is spotty with the evaluation efforts of some countries, notably the United Kingdom, showing promise. In addition, points to several suggestions for governments to strengthen their capacity to assess the impact of their management development programmes. Concludes by arguing that governments tend to bias their evaluation of management development efforts and the results when they initially identify what ought to be evaluated and how.

Information technology (IT) has often been cited as being able to create competitive advantage. However, the degree of leverage is often dependent upon several factors, not least the type and level of IT training provided, resources available, management commitment, and prevailing level of corporate culture. This paper introduces the generic processes involved in developing an IT training framework in order to support and deliver the business strategy, and presents findings in the form of a generic IT training model. This model identifies the sequential stages needed to commission and deploy IT training in a construction environment in the form of an implementation roadmap. This model was developped with two leading UK construction organizations. Findings have identified that seven core process phases should be considered before committing resources to training. Recommendations include identifying the core business benefits and matching these to the training outcomes, albeit cognisant of barriers such as lack of empowerment, organizational culture, resource limitations, and so on.

Economists have known for some time that increases in the amounts of capital and labour cannot explain all of the growth of output (Kendrick, 1961, 1976). Schultz showed the potential importance of human resource development in explaining this residual when he made estimates of investments in education for the period 1900 to 1957. He stated that educational capital was clearly an important element in production and that it had risen at a much faster rate than reproducible non‐human wealth (Schultz, 1960, 1962).

This chapter examines the ways in which the provision of training and development for leaders and managers in Cairo underwent profound change during the Arab Spring. It provides an important insight into the capacity of higher education institutes (HEIs) to respond to social and political movements and to the ways in which we might frame education and training.

The chapter draws directly on the experience of the author and her colleagues as they responded to the explicit and implicit needs of the social movements on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring of 2011.

The chapter illustrates the extent to which HEIs can be responsive to expressed needs and it offers insights and understandings of the professional relationships between colleagues and participants as they seek to co-construct a new curriculum.

The chapter examines important social change through the perspective of an HEI whose values are ones of promoting learning and professional development in a context where such ideas and concepts are being explicitly challenged and rewritten.

Since the execution of National Health Insurance system in Taiwan, the competition of medical industry is becoming more and more severe. The ways the hospital operate knowledge management (KM) concept, combine current human resources and professional knowledge by information techniques and upgrade the competitiveness through reinvention of organizational culture have become the important issues. This research is based on the relationship between KM and organizational operation, integrates the characteristic of medical institutions and framework of medical knowledge cycle and starts the research subject by questionnaires from three dimensions: current situation of KM construction in medical organizations, executive effect of KM activities and the challenges faced by KM; subsequently, from qualitative interview, this research attempts to understand how a medical organization executes and adjusts in the consideration of theory and reality as well as quality and costs when actually operates the organization. This research accesses to KM system application of medical institutions and the empirical executive benefits and difficulties through questionnaires. The research results are as follows: (1) having initial understanding toward current KM establishment of medical institutions; (2) confirming the most important items of KM establishment of medical organizations; (3) understanding the most difficulty which the medical organizations encounter when executing KM; (4) establishing medical knowledge cycle figure of the hospitals receiving interviews. Through case interview, this research profoundly accessed to the actual operation of KM application of medical organizations. The target hospitals intended to try many medical KM measures; however, during to complicated hospital organizations and cultural characteristics, the promotion was not successful and the results were not apparent. The most difficulty was to change the employees’ behavior. The targets believed that only the continuous promotion of KM can allow it to be an important aspect of organizational culture and the competitiveness could constant be upgraded.

Does executive coaching really work? Does it help improve leadership effectiveness and productivity? This action research study answers these questions by tracking the progress of 281 executives participating in a six‐month coaching and 360 feedback process. The results suggest that the combination of multi‐rater feedback and individual coaching do increase leadership effectiveness up to 60 per cent ‐‐ according to direct report and peer post‐survey feedback. Implications of the results for future executive development programs are discussed, and specific recommendations are provided.