Employee Training and Development: What Trade-offs for the Public Sector in Ghana?

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to explore, examine and analyze the factors that account for the inability of the trained employees of the MMDAs to apply the knowledge, skills and attitudes acquired from training and development programmes to their job and its effect on organizational performance and effectiveness. It also seeks to identify problems limiting professional development and to propose pragmatic systematic training and development models .To achieve this objective, a descriptive survey design was employed. A stratified and simple random sampling methods were employed to obtain a sample size (n) of 100 eligible respondents from a population (N) of 125 employees. The sample size was made up of 6 senior level employees, 26 middle level employees and 68 operational level employees. Self-administered questionnaires were used to gather primary data, while books, journals, and articles were used for the secondary data. .A total of 95 responses, representing 95 percent of the sample were judged good enough and was used for the analysis. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the questionnaire and the results were presented in percentages, tables and cross-tabulations. Selected independent variables such as identification of training needs, training content, facilitation process, skills acquired, utilization of skills and changes in employee performance were related to organizational performance and effectiveness, the dependent variable. This was based on the assumption that training and development of employees enhance organizational performance and effectiveness.

Keywords: Organisational performance, training and development, training needs Assessment, transfer of learning.