Human resource management - Essay Example

First Last Dr. First last 14 April 2008 Retraining for Advancement in Career Is J.D concerned more with job security or career security? Discuss. J.D. is clearly concerned about “career security” rather than “job security”. Even though J.D.’s acquired skill set in Plant Design Systems made him useful in his current job, the factors for job success in his assessment all relate to career security in the long term spanning beyond any particular job or position. Job security in the classic definitions meant that, with a defined set of skills, one could continue in the same job for a long period of time.

The assumption was that external factors either remained the same or changed very slowly resulting in little or no effect on the person’s job prospects. However, in the modern sense, this definition does not hold valid any more.Significant competitive pressures, advancements in technology, privatizations and mergers have forced companies to continually enhance their systems and human resource skills. As a result, a “secure” job one day would not be considered secure the next day. Additionally, increased requirements of productivity and new conditions make jobs redundant while creating space for new jobs with new or enhanced skill sets. J.D.

Wallance has highlighted these very factors and offered a solution that remains beyond the realm of a single job position. He has emphasized that the initiative for retraining for career protection lies with the individual and not with the company this person works for as “very few companies” focus on “necessary training” for employees. In his assessment, in the face of fast paced changes in work environments, employees have a choice between “being left behind” by stagnating their knowledge or open up new options for themselves in the job market by having more current skill sets.

Do you agree with J.D’s statement that “improving your skills is never a waste of time,” considering that he has learned systems which quickly became obsolete? Discuss.Even though there is a level of subjectivity to this statement, it is agreed that skill improvement should not be considered a waste of time. It is not always possible to fully predict whether a certain newly acquired skill would result in career advancement and success or not. For example, back when Internet was still not widely available in the commercial domain, fully assessing its impact on the global economy was not easy.

Training in Internet technologies at that time could be termed a calculated guess which paid off in the long run. Extending the same example, anyone restricting oneself to HTML technology may have limited the options for growth. Newer technologies on the horizon, still untested and many far different from each other, could still provide a more certain chance of success compared with doing nothing. The subjectivity mentioned earlier is introduced by potential failure as in the example in the text.

However, one must first analyze the background in which such a failure can occur. Typically, in company sponsored training, a reasonable amount of thinking and money is spent on researching the viability of new training. Training by individuals on their own also requires their own judgment on the applicability of newly acquired knowledge. With fast and parallel changes taking place in newer systems, both companies and individuals may err in their judgment. This may result in investment in skills which become obsolete quickly or even not be useful at all in the short term.

However, in view of a career advancement objective of wider employability rather than job security, this is a relatively smaller risk to take compared with having no training at all.One must also look at another perspective that it is very rare that system and technology advancements are complete paradigm shifts. Training in such systems, more often than not, provide a stepping stone to the next level of skill set required for career advancement while allowing some of the knowledge to be reused.

The example of Internet technologies is again useful here. In the late nineties, individuals had a choice to train in one of several tools beginning to appear for web content development. Knowledge in one, however, did not preclude the possibility of working in the other as many basic principles remained the same. Even if any particular tool became obsolete, the learning curve in moving to a different tool was reduced considerably with the help of reuse of knowledge.