Trends and Challenges in HRD

Human resources development or HRD is very important in today’s corporate environment. Management’s support for HRD increases motivation and brings about enhanced productivity among regular and non-regular employees. Redundancies have resulted in rising unemployment and this has resulted in the rise of HRD being imparted by vocational training agencies and schools. In performance-based systems, workplaces focus on short-term results and neglect employee training. To prevent this, a performance-based wage and treatment system should be implemented by setting performance goals in terms of training of subordinates or one’s own HRD.
In the ultimate analysis, HRD is about how people are treated and its relevance increases where an enterprise takes a long-term view, rather than a short-term one, of what it wants to achieve . The importance of human resources management or HRM in achieving management objectives is reflected in the transformation of the personnel management function, which has changed its perspective from employee welfare to managing people to obtain the best and highest productivity possible, through methods that provide both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards .
Changes in industrial relations or IR practices such as increased collective bargaining at enterprise level, flexibility in relation to forms of employment as well as in relation to working time and job functions are the result of heightened competition, rapid changes in products and processes and the increasing importance of skills, quality and productivity. Improved quality and productivity linked to motivation can be achieved through training, employee involvement and extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Building strong cultures promotes organizational goals, and brings about unity between management and employees.

However, rapid change due to market conditions is sometimes difficult to achieve in an organization with a strong culture. IBM found it difficult to change in time, when the market required a change in product and service from mainframe, customized systems to personal computers. The attitude that people are a variable cost is replaced by the view that people are a resource and that can be developed and can contribute to the competitive advantage. In the future managements will rely on HRM to enhance enterprise competitiveness. HRM has a strategic role and is a means for achieving management objectives.
The trends and challenges of the future are the rising cost of health care, which threatens to affect U. S. economic competitiveness. Global competitiveness has brought about outsourcing which reduces costs dramatically, but increases domestic unemployment it highlights the economic disadvantage of increased health care costs in the United States as compared to other countries, such as India and China the mainstays of outsourcing. It is also creating the need to get as much value as possible from fewer employees, leading to a growing focus on productivity.
Overall, global competitiveness is a very important trend in 2006. In the USA the large numbers of baby boomers slated to retire around the same time leading to the loss of a large proportion of workers further encourages outsourcing. In conclusion it can be stated that there is a clear indication of a potential rise in employees’ feelings of insecurity through more intense global competition for jobs, more individuals without access to health insurance and fears about data security and identity theft and the vulnerability of technology to attack or disaster.
These are the trends that could lead to a reexamination of the relationship between employers and employees, especially employer obligations to provide benefits such as health coverage and pensions, as well as the importance of feeling safe and secure to employee job satisfaction. These issues that human resource professionals identify as having a potentially significant impact on the workplace and on the HR profession illustrate the multitude of factors that have a bearing on the working world. This poses a daunting challenge while planning for the future.
HR professionals true to form have made significant progress in responding to many of these trends. For example, many HR professionals have implemented succession planning in order to prepare for the loss of organizational leaders. Nevertheless, many of the challenges posed by the broader trends are just beginning to be addressed by organizations. Some of the most urgent trends are rising health care costs and outsourcing of jobs resulting in unemployment or underemployment as has already been discussed.