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Analyses whether the participation of workers in general, sector‐specific, and firm‐specific training affects their expectations on job mobility within or outside the call centres sector. Distinguishes between the perceived difficulty to find an equally attractive job and the inclination to quit for another job. Employing data on 525 call centre agents working in eight call centres in The Netherlands, finds that training does not significantly affect the perceived labour market perspectives of call centre agents, nor influence expected job mobility inside or outside the sector. The inclination to quit the present job within two years is the same for agents with and without training. There is one exception, however. Agents who followed firm‐specific training significantly less often considered quitting for a job in another call centre. All this is good news for firms offering training. Another finding, however, might be more problematic. The work experience of agents positively affects their labour market perspectives inside the sector. In addition, agents with more experience are more inclined to quit for a job in another call centre. This means that firms need to keep their employees satisfied.

On‐the‐job training has a large positive effect on wages for employees in Sweden, and employees in jobs that require long on‐the‐job training earn significantly more than workers in jobs with short training requirements. The effects of training are large for recently hired and low for senior employees. There are significant wage effects of general and specific on‐the‐job training, and the effect is significantly larger for general training. Separate estimates for the public and private sectors show significant effects of specific training only for public‐sector employees and large effects of general training for private‐sector employees. The results suggest that the distinction between general and specific training matters, that firms are willing to pay for general training and that there is heterogeneity in the returns to these forms of training.

Research in labour economics during the past several years has led to the development of the theory of human capital. This theory deals with a variety of issues concerning the productivity of people as the result of their human capital.

In the context of higher education and further education, scientific research plays a major role in the development and quality of teaching and careers (research active teachers). However, this opportunity is denied to most teachers of languages for specific purposes (LSP) who find themselves teaching their subject without any prior training in a specialized field with which they are not familiar. To compensate for the lack of specific training for these teachers, a training experiment including a component devoted to an initiation to scientific research was conducted (TRAILs, 2021). The arrival of the pandemic forced us to change the project to a distance learning format shortly before its implementation, which was planned for a summer session at the university. We describe the innovative online training module for developing a research career that focused on action research and empowerment of participants.

Research on employee training has largely focused on either the employer or employees, and has investigated the likelihood or amount of training rather than the content of training. Our understanding about how organizations decide to focus on different skills therefore remains constrained. To address this issue, the current study examines what affects training consulting organizations’ focus on different types of training, and in particular, their focus on personal development training, a highly popular type of training in recent years. Training organizations have become an increasingly important supplier in the training field. Building on the neo-institutional perspective of organizations, I propose an institutional analysis of training organizations. I argue that at a fundamental level, the kinds of skills organizations consider useful (such as specific-technical, general-technical, human relations, and personal development skills), are affected by the shared organizing principles of their time, and I draw on the research on managerial ideology to understand how such shared frameworks evolved over time. Training organizations try to conform to the dominant organizational model at their founding in order to gain legitimacy for their product offerings and convince their clients of the efficacy of their services. The focus of training is thus shaped by the dominant organizational model at founding and tends to stay with training organizations. Specifically, I argue that training organizations founded later in time, when the participatory citizenship model of organization became dominant, are more likely to focus on personal development. I analyze a 10% random sample (N=269) of the population of training organizations in 1994 with logistic models. Empirical results are consistent with the proposed link between the skills trained and the dominant organizational model at the training organizations’ founding. Characteristics of training organizations focused on personal development are also compared with those focused on other types of training. The implication of this study for the classic question, “why do employers provide general-skill training?” is discussed.

To evaluate past and recent research on the costs of training human resources in Australia and to compare the merits of different research methods used to measure these costs. The discussion is situated in a general context of low employer contribution to training provision in Australia and acute policy debates on public training provision.

The article presents the aggregate results of two recent quantitative surveys of training costs in Australian organizations. Both surveys adopt an economic definition of the costs and concentrate on firm‐specific skills acquired up until new recruits reach average productivity.

Survey results suggest that the informal costs of training human resources outstrip direct training expenditure and average training costs are much larger than commonly assumed in the policy debate in Australia.

Ideally, the surveys reported upon should be extended to include continuing training costs and a measure of the degree of employer‐provided general training.

Official surveys largely underestimate the cost of employer‐provided training in Australia, contributing to (mistaken?) perceptions of private sector disengagement. Existing measures of the costs should adopt a more comprehensive approach, including the use of economic concepts.

This research stresses, both to HR practitioners and policy makers, the value of measuring opportunity costs in training processes, and contributes to its quantification.

Whether training contributes to stabilizing employment among rural migrant workers in cities remains unclear. Based on this gap in the research, the purpose of this paper is to examine how on-the-job training affects rural migrant workers’ job mobility in China.

By using randomly sampled survey data on migrant workers in Liaoning province in 2014, the authors applied a logistic model and survival analysis to explore the effect of on-the-job training on migrant workers’ job turnover and understand workers’ job change behaviour after receiving on-the-job training.

The results showed that job training provided by employers can significantly reduce migrant workers’ turnover by increasing specific human capital. By contrast, training provided by the government or migrant workers themselves focuses on increasing general human capital and thus fails to reduce job turnover. Moreover, further discussion revealed that, in the trained group, those people with a short tenure and low wage in the first job, people without any skills before migration, male migrant workers, and people that work in medium-sized and large cities have a higher probability of changing jobs. These findings suggest that to tackle the high rate of job mobility among rural migrant workers, firms should entice this labour to train by adjusting their internal training mechanisms, and local governments should subsidize firms that provide on-the-job training for rural migrant workers to help share the costs and risks of training. Moreover, for sake of reducing job changing among those trained workers, firms even should take actions to protect their labour rights of migrant workers and to ensure that they receive equal treatment to their urban counterparts.

This paper makes three contributions to the field of job mobility in China. First, it explores the mechanism between on-the-job training and rural migrant workers’ job mobility. Second, it empirically analyses the effect of on-the-job training on migrant workers’ job mobility as well as the different effects of general and specific training. Lastly, its results have important policy implications for the employment stability of rural migrant workers.

Describes a study undertaken to assess how private club managers perceive the relative effectiveness of alternative training methods to attain specific types of training objectives. Data were obtained from 123 club managers who were members of the Club Managers Association of America. Participants rated the effectiveness of 16 alternate training methods for potential use in six different types of training situations. Training methods studied included case study, video‐tape, lecture, one‐to‐one, role play, games, computer simulations, paper and pencil, audiotapes, self‐assessment, movies/films, multi‐media, audio, computer and video conferencing and sensitivity training. Training objectives studied were knowledge acquisition, changing attitudes, problem solving, interpersonal skill development, participant acceptance and knowledge retention. Analysis of data indicated that one‐to‐one training is the preferred method to attain all objectives except interpersonal skill development.