The science of training and development in organizations

Each year in the United States about $135 billion is spent in training employees — but those billions do not always improve the workplace because the skills often do not transfer to the actual job.

“Learning is a way of life in organizations,” says Eduardo Salas, a psychological scientist from the University of Central Florida.

In a new report published inPsychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Salas and co-authors conclude that when this money is well spent, “training and development activities allow organizations to adapt, compete, excel, innovate, produce, be safe, improve service and reach goals.”

One of the most important things that “matters,” the researchers found in their survey of the vast scientific literature on the science of training, is that human resource executives, chief learning officers and business leaders should view training as a whole system and not a one-time event. This means that what happens before and after the actual training is just as important as the training itself.

Read the entire article about Dr. Salas here.