How can inservice training and development support employee retention within the communication team - Dissertation Example

Because there are significant gaps in knowledge literature supporting whether inservice training can serve as a predictor for improved retention, this study aimed to identify the tangible and intangible factors (intrinsic versus extrinsic) that could potentially lead inservice training to be a predictor of positive retention outcomes. Inservice training represents training provided to current employees, either short- or long-term, that provides new knowledge on systems, technologies, or behavioural changes needed to effectively facilitate a changing job role and organisational/competitive environment.

The best practices in developing and delivering inservice training are not widely available in research literature, thus this project intended to identify these best practices or structural obligations of creating effective inservice training to determine how this might impact attitudes or behaviours of those in the communications team that are exposed to inservice training processes and content. The study was primarily desk-based, analysing large volumes of secondary research data in areas of psycho-social characteristics in employees, the functional and structural designs of inservice training, the nature of communications team development, as well as communities of practice as a development tool associated with inservice training.

The research indicated many different phenomenon associated with how individuals process knowledge, highlighting constraint theory, transfer theory, and metacognition. The secondary research effort identified the potential linkages between the aforementioned theories and how they might theoretically impact assessment of various inservice training content, delivery and substance. The many psychological dimensions of trainee evaluation and its relationship with the organisational environment is highlighted.

This study also maintained a qualitative primary study, involving interviews with a small sample of real-world organisational actors as a means of understanding how a business might structure inservice training and its potential relationships to improving or supporting retention. The interviews identified many disparities to the different processing and evaluation theories identified in the secondary research, whilst at the same time supported the general feasibility of metacognition, constraint and transfer theory, and their potential linkages to inservice training.

The study findings identified no specific data that would concretely justify that inservice training could be a predictor of higher retention in communications teams. However, the data achieved from the small sample of interviews respondents did indicate certain trends associated with inservice training that closed some of the gaps in research knowledge on these potential linkages and their associations with various psychological trainee evaluations. These included the importance of using pre-testing to identify different learning styles of those attending inservice training programmes, and the identification of personality styles, prior to launching an inservice package.

This data supported some of the concepts associated with metacognition and constraint theory.