CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Organizational effectiveness rests on the efficient and effective performance of employees. The efficient and effective performance of the workforce in turn, rest on the richness of the knowledge, skills and abilities possessed by the workforce. Manpower training and development in most organizations is a continuous act/exercise. The inexorable march of time and the ceaseless glamour for social change combine to make adaptability and continuing preparation of the workforce as inevitable as the initial acquisition of knowledge and skills. This cannot happen if employees training and development do not occur in an enterprise. In other to maximize the productivity and efficiency of the organization, every executive, manager or supervisor in a public or private organization has the responsibility and indeed the bounding duty to ensure the development of their employees who have requisite knowledge and expertise.

    Manpower training and development should be based on a need analysis derived from a comparison of “actual performance’’ and behavior with “required performance’’ and behavior. Manpower training and development is one of the major ways organization invests in the workforce for greater return today and even in the foreseeable future.

Training is like sharpening an existing skill in order to reflect the trends in technology and other social –cultural environmental changes of an organization. Productivity is the goal of today’s competitive business world and training can be a spring board to enhance productivity. The aim is to enable them contribute their full measure to the welfare, health and development of the organization (Onah 1993). The main objective of training and development in service organization is to increase efficiency of employees with the resulting increase in corporate productivity. This accounts for why a large number of fund and time is expected by organization at one period or the order in the improvement of the skills of their employees at various levels.

       The principal intention of training according to Akpan (1982), is to equip people with the knowledge required to qualify them for a particular position of employment, or to improve their skills and efficiency in the position they already hold.

       Manpower development on the other hand, implies growth and the acquisition of wide experience for future strategic advantages of the organization.

       Manpower training and development therefore, improves the effectiveness and efficiency of the employee. Therefore, the aim of this research is to know the current state, nature, procedure and method of training and development used by the Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC) for their employees and let’s not forget that any organization that has no plan for the training and development of its staff is less than dynamic for learning is a continuous process and acquired skills get obsolete when the environment changes. Also, a popular caption in the field of personnel management says, “If you think training and development are expensive try ignorance’’. While training and development prosper organization, ignorance destroys it. Therefore, workers like machines must be updated on constant basis or else, they end up becoming obsolete or misfit.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Despite the strategic dimension of manpower investment, most organization in Nigeria remains inert. Life in such organization is a sheer drudgery. Initiative is most often discouraged due to an environment that neither empowers nor enables the individuals to accomplish anything.

It is generally observed that whenever there is a resources crunch in Nigerian organizations, the first axe falls on human resources in terms of retrenchments and cuts in manpower development and training budgets. Employee are said to be a “soul” of the organization, but there are treated as the “sole” of the organization to tramp with. Organizations are hostile to their people, why are they so? Why are organizations more concerned with profits than with the well being of their people? Why are human resources regarded as part of organizational problems instead of being regarded as part of the solution to its problem? Why do organizations continue to seek solutions to their competitive challenges by downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing and weakening their organizational culture, rather than putting their people first and drawing from extensive research, which confirms that organizations do gain enduring competitive advantage through investment in their people?

Even when there appears to be a general consensus that manpower investment is a strategy for organizational competitive advantage. Nigeria organizations think and perform differently. Indeed neglect of human resources is the order of the day in most Nigerian organizations. Can it be that the claim that manpower investment is a potent strategy for organizational competitive advantage is in the Nigerian environment, an invalid one?