CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1              Background of the Study

Training in Nigeria could be traced back to 1960 when it was discovered that most of the top government and business positions were occupied by expatriates (Olalere and Adesoji, 2013).

The departure of the whites after independence gave rise to a big vacuum of capable indigenous human capital. This prompted the Federal Government of Nigeria to set up a Manpower Board in 1962 following the Ashby Commission’s Recommendations (Olalere and Adesoji, 2013).Consequently, the Federal Government of Nigeria established complimentary institutions like the Centre for Management Development (CMD), Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON), Industrial Training Fund (ITF), and Federal Training Centre to train and retrain employees as well as give orientation to fresh graduates of formal academic institutions (Olalere and Adesoji, 2013).

Today, we are witnessing an overwhelming number of research studies from both descriptive and prescriptive traditions, focusing on several characteristics of training programmes as well as their costs and benefits for organizations (Becker and Gerhart, 1996). At the same time, organizations have come to better understand the significance of training for their survival in knowledge-intensive and volatile markets of this era, and thus have increasingly acknowledged the profitability of developing their human resources through various forms of training (Berge, 2001; Salas and Cannon-Bowers, 2001).