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The purpose of this paper is to inform the preparation of HRD professionals by providing an empirical analysis of the knowledge, skills, and responsibilities employers expect in the workplace.

This study reports a qualitative content analysis of online HRD job postings.

Results of this content analysis indicated that the most recent employer expectations for HRD practitioners as reflected in HRD-related job postings for knowledge and responsibilities were instructional design, training delivery, learning management systems, and learning technologies. The outcomes reinforced that employers specifically expect education technology-based knowledge and skills.

The job postings included in the study were all collected from one source, the Association for Talent Development job site.

Educational programs can use these findings to inform curricular decisions related to knowledge and skills to be taught and practiced during the preparation of L&D practitioners and HRD professionals.

This paper analyzes online HRD job postings to understand what knowledge and skills employers expected from L&D practitioners and HRD professionals.

Within the scope of the Targeted Socio‐Economic Research (TSER) project (1998‐2000), that aimed to examine new human resource development (HRD) initiatives in learning‐oriented organisations throughout Europe, this paper confronts the Belgian findings with the European outlook. The study examines how HRD departments in learning‐oriented organisations envision their new role in stimulating and supporting employees to learn continuously, what strategies HRD departments adopt to realise their envisioned role and what inhibiting factors they encounter when tying to realise their new role. The results of a survey of 165 companies, of which 39 are located in Belgium, showed a paucity of innovative HRD practices. However, professionals indicate that strategies to support the business and to stimulate learning and knowledge sharing will become increasingly important strategies in the future. The factors that appear to significantly hinder the change process are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine human resource development (HRD) in the UK National Health Service (NHS), and particularly in two Welsh NHS Trusts, to help illuminate the various ways in which learning, training and development are talked about. The NHS is a complex organisation, not least with its recent devolution and separation into the four distinct countries of the UK. Within this, there are multiple and often conflicting approaches to human resource development associated with the various forms of employee, professional (nursing, medical etc.), managerial and organisational development. How people are developed is crucial to developing a modern health service, and yet, with the diverse range of health workers, HRD is a complex process, and one which receives little attention. Managers have a key role and their perceptions of HRD can be analysed through the discursive resources they employ.

From an interpretivist stance, the paper employs semi‐structured interviews with seven Directorate‐General Managers, and adopts discourse analysis to explore how HRD is talked about in two Welsh NHS Trusts.

The paper finds some of the different discourses used by different managers, including those with a nursing background and those without. It examines how they talk about HRD, and also explores their own (management) development and the impact this has had on their sense of identity.

The paper highlights some of the tensions associated with HRD in the NHS, including ambiguities between professional and managerial development, the functional and physical fragmentation of HRD, conflict between a focus on performance/service delivery and the need to learn, discursive dissonance between the use of the terms training and learning, a delicate balance between “going on courses” and informal, work‐related learning, inequities regarding “protected time” and discourses shifting between competition and cooperation. These tensions are exposed to help develop a shared understanding of the complexities of HRD within the NHS. The paper concludes with a summary of the different discursive resources employed by senior managers to articulate and accomplish HRD. These are “surfaced” to enable managers and HRD practitioners, amongst others, to construct common repertoires and shared meaning.

Many factors may influence the training and development of middle-skill, low-skill, and disadvantaged workers. Within the United States and worldwide there are many middle-skilled, low-skilled, and disadvantaged workers whom training and development professionals must consider as organizations seek to expand their workforce and increase productivity using technology. Temporary agencies employ many middle-skilled, low-skilled, and disadvantaged workers; however, there is very little information regarding how effective these agencies are in developing these workers beyond the skill level with which they enter the agency.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach for the teaching and delivery of HRD practices, professional skills and theory that challenges the modernist orthodoxy of contemporary organisational life and the requirements of professional bodies.

First, the territory of a critical HRD pedagogy is defined within practices that respect human freedom and individual dignity as opposed to instrumentalism and target setting. Second, it will advocate an approach for a HRD pedagogy that has its roots within the lost paradigm of sentimentalism that emphasises the belief in the goodness of humanity informing the romantic notions of human imagination, creativity and respect for the individual that is realised through the dialogical process.

The findings, evinced by vignettes, advocate a critical HRD pedagogy and the development of professional skills that base their values and ethics within emancipatory practices if organisations are to create and support sustainable learning environments rather than those located within the conventional wisdom of modernist orthodoxy.

This paper calls for a critical HRD pedagogy and learning environments where individuals are engaged in the transformation of their socio‐historical‐political worlds and advocates dialogue is central to classroom practice if it is to realise the potential and creative impulses of individuals.

This paper contributes to the critical HRD discourse in the development of knowledge, skills, values and professional practice by addressing the constraints of classroom practice in its response to the demands and tensions of professional bodies. It explicitly develops a critical HRD pedagogy that has implications for the assessment of HRD programmes and of their resourcing.

To explore and describe the roles, activities and strategies of French human resource development professionals.

This paper is based primarily on exploratory and descriptive research. A range of secondary sources on European and French human resource development is critically reviewed to generate a number of research questions designed to identify the corporate perspective on human resource development by means of cases drawn from six organizations located in Eastern France.

These confirm the lack of a clear understanding of human resource development on the part of French companies; the wide range of activities that is considered to fall within human resource development; an emerging interest in management development, career development and skills forecasting, but a neglect of training evaluation; the similarity of human resource development practitioner roles to those elsewhere in Europe; growing evidence of the involvement of line managers in human resource development activity, and a strong commitment to the strategic significance of human resource development.

The study was based on an opportunity sample of just six companies in Eastern France, and may therefore not be representative, but it does provide findings that expand upon and also qualify earlier research.

This study provides new knowledge and understanding of the context and practice of human resource development in France and makes a number of suggestions for further research.

This paper provides original research based on recent cases of corporate human resource development practice, and should be of interest to scholars of international human resource development.

Revisits the literature on strategic human resource development (SHRD) in the context of Garavan’s work on the characteristics of SHRD. A conceptual framework is constructed that redefines SHRD stressing a shaping rather than supporting role for HRD in relation to corporate strategy. The concept of strategic maturity in HRD is examined linking the work of Garavan; Lee and McCracken; and Wallace. The resulting model of strategic maturity is then analysed empirically using data from a major questionnaire and interview survey. A new model of strategic partnerships in HRD is then proposed.

An attempt is made to illustrate the multi‐faceted and multifarious nature of human resource development worldwide, following a definition of it and a description of how it operates in a number of countries throughout the world, including the US, the EEC countries, India, Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The roles and functions of HRD practitioners are examined, and the competences required listed. A short history of the International Federation of Training and Development Organisations is offered and a list of conferences described.

A firm's competitiveness depends on its capacity to manage performance and improve the development of the skills and competencies of employees – creating a learning environment. Although the Nepalese economy has embraced an open market policy and is attempting to join the global market, competitive advantage is being hindered by a failure to address human resource development (HRD) and by poor performance management (PM) practices. This paper seeks to address this issue.

The research article raises three research questions: What is the concept of PM – how does it relate to HRD? What is the PM and HRD context and what are the associated issues in Nepalese organizations? and How could new structure and roles improve HRD for PM? In order to answer these research questions Anglo‐Saxon and Nepalese literature is reviewed.

In order to manage PM in Nepalese organizations a clear link between organizational objectives and outcomes should be established by developing a human capital base in organizations. HRD professionals help to integrate HRD functions and organizational objectives by creating a learning environment.

The study is not survey‐based and thus information is largely collected from published literature rather than perceptions of employees, management and labour unions and the authenticity of the prescribed four‐column‐model is yet to be tested.

A four‐column model comprising HRD and PM context, PM issues, HRD issues, and the new HRD structure and functions is developed and can be used as a framework for undertaking future research. This framework is the main contribution of the paper.