Factors affecting workshops as training and development programmes at KENGEN

Abstract

The world has become a global village. Competition among organizations producing similar products and services has highly escalated. Organisations have devised ways and means to stay competitive by ensuring that their staff are equipped with the rights skills. As a result, emphasis on training has taken centre stage. Today's organization views on training have greatly changed such that they place a lot of emphasis on employees with the right skills, knowledge and abilities. This is because employees at all levels of business playa very key role in implementing strategies directed towards sustaining competitive advantage. This however is an aspect that organizations enhance through human resource interventions such as workshops, seminars, conferences etc. The focus of this study was to investigate factors affecting workshops as a training and development programme. The study took a descriptive approach involving employees of Kenya Electricity Generating Company within the lCT department. This is because descriptive studies are more formalized and typically structured with clearly stated hypothesis or investigative questions. It also serves a variety of research objectives such as description of phenomenon or characteristics associated with a subject population. A total of 80 employees from the lCT department were randomly chosen and interviewed. The research instrument used was a structured questionnaire that was filled by employees. The study discovered that workshops as training and development programmes are affected by factors such as training needs assessment, the meaningfulness of training resources, trainees readness to learn and opportunities for feedback after training. The study discovered that for trainees to benefit during workshops, proper needs assessment needs to be done as part of the organizations strategy to improve its levels of productivity. The study also discovered that the quality and meaningfulness of training materials affects the learning process during workshops. From the findings, the readness of trainees to learn affects their ability to benefit from the workshop and their motivation to look forward to more training. From the results of the research, it also emerged that feedback is important after workshops because it helps the employees to decide on their performance standards.