answers to the questions given from the case study. this is related to HR learning and development.

ihrdCase Study PDF case Design and Development of Training - The IHRD Way - nstitute of HRD (IHRD) is a Professional HR Consulting, Research, Training and Development Organization established in 1995 by a group of experienced training professionals. It aims at providing world-class training to HR Professionals, Business Managers, and others to enhance their competencies, individual and organizational growth. It organizes workshops, seminars and training programmes and conferences on significant issues of human resource management for the benefit of the organizations. Institute of HRD is committed to the total development of Human Resource Professionals. Industry has appreciated all its programmes and rated them very highly. IHRD works with a philosophy "Redefining Excellence in Corporate Training". Mr.Siraj is the Programme Director, Institute of HRD. He is a Rank Holder in Engineering from Mysore University. He holds an M.B.A in Human Resources Management. He has designed and successfully conducted a wide range of training programmes for MNC's, Private and Public sector enterprises in India and the Middle East. He was the Vice- President-South Indian Society for Training & Development, during 2001-2002. He is involved in the activities of many professional bodies like, Institute of Director, National HRD Network, Bangalore Management Association, National Institute of Personnel Management, and Bangalore Toastmaster Club. His specialized areas in management include Competency Development, Leadership, Sourcing and Organizational Behaviour. He has co-edited five books which include Performance Management, Competency Mapping, Assessment & Development, Strategic HRM, Training & Development, & Talent management. Mr. Siraj has personally conducted training programmes for many well known organizations which include Larsen & Toubro Ltd., ABB Ltd., Siemens Information Systems, ITC Info Tech, Avaya India, Sanofi Aventis, Ranbaxy Laboratories, ACC Ltd. and many more. IHRD has the challenge of designing at least ten programmes every month. Nearly half of them are designed for the specific needs of client companies and remaining half are open programmes for employees from different organizations. Design and development is not limited to new programmes alone. Even an existing programme of IHRD undergoes revision and updation if it has to be repeated during the next year. Designing a customised programme for the exclusive use of an organization requires careful analysis of the learning challenges unique to that organization. Factors such as the employee characteristics (like education, experience, language orientation, age, handicaps etc.); the nature of business (like hardware, software, manufacturing, servicing etc.); the profile of customers (like educated, rights-conscious, elite classes, organised poor etc.) and the work processes (like automation, safety, agility etc.) will be taken into Contd... account while designing the training programme. In order to collect information pertaining to the above aspects, IHRD holds discussions with the senior managers, role holders departmental heads and other people who have an interface with the target group of participants in the client organization. To further fine-tune the programme to the exact requirement of the participants, it collects information about the competencies the participants are required to develop, using a structured questionnaire. IHRD also looks into the special learning needs of the organization which encouraged it to go for an exclusive programme. The data is collected from the company both from primary and secondary sources. Designing the open programme is not like designing a customised programme. Open programmes do not provide any baseline data like those available for company specific programmes. You really do not know who are going to attend an open programme and the kind of learning needs they have. Therefore, designing open programmes requires a great deal of research to understand the latest trends and challenges in learning and development across various organizations. Academic journals, newspaper articles and talks at professional association meetings provide a lot of valuable information. The IHRD facilitators and trainers make concerted efforts to move around and collect information from all such sources before sitting down for the design work. Based on all the above factors the programme objectives are developed as a first step towards designing a programme. However, the designs are not determined exclusively by the learning objectives. There are many intervening variable like time required under ideal conditions and the time available, the funds required and available and the infrastructure required and available. Based on these factors, the design may have to undergo some amount of revision. Once the training objectives are identified many new questions arise, like the methodologies and techniques to be used, the duration and timings to be fixed, the topics to be sequenced and the availability of resource persons for each of those topics: In the case of customised programmes, consultation with the client organization is very essential at this stage too. After careful considerations of all these factors, the IHRD professionals sit down for finalizing the programme design. The draft designs are reviewed by the peers and other professionals and after discussion among the various parties involved, the design acquires its final shape. The work on programme development starts the moment design work ends. Development involves several activities like searching for the relevant literature, drafting of reference material, preparing presentation slides, developing learning activities, devising an evaluation plan and many more tasks beyond design. Design is like dreaming of a programme structure and development is like realising the dream. Design is a hardcore at the end the day, the joy of developing a training programme is immense. thinking activity to create a mental model. Development involves a lot of hard labour but Contd. Design and development of a training programme is both time-consuming and expensive in the absence of professional expertise. The cost of designing a two-day programme may be anything between Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 10,000 and the time may be around three to seven days. But the decades of hardcore HRD experience of IHRD professionals in the profession helps them to speed up the work for delivering the programme to their clients at the shortest possible time at affordable cost. Questions 1. Why is it that open programmes and customised programmes require different approaches in designing? What are the major challenges in designing a training programme? What are the competitive advantages of IHRD in training design? 2 3