Search results

Skills audits represent an important vehicle for analysing and monitoring skills coverage across organisations and nations and identifying skills gaps and mismatches that exist. In so doing, they provide valuable data on the competitive positioning of organisations and nations and help determine priorities for investment. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use and prevalence of skills audits to improve individual, organisational and societal outcomes.

Following the guidance of Torraco (2016), this paper takes the form of an integrative literature review. The authors conducted a series of keyword searches using databases such as Google Scholar, ABI Inform, Science Direct and Emerald. Title word searches used the terms: “skills audit”, “skills analysis”, “skills inventory”, “skills mapping” and the authors reviewed articles that were published between the period: 1990 to 2020.

Skills audits remain a useful tool to assess skill attainment and progression on university and college programmes, giving individuals a better understanding of their particular strengths and allowing them to develop realistic career plans and goals. From an organisational perspective, skill audits add value where they are strategically linked to job design, recruitment and training initiatives. They are also useful in helping organisations identify skill shortages, particularly if they relate skills outages to future growth areas. Finally, skills audits can sustain career counselling, but need to remain flexible in categorising skills in relation to the gig economy and remote working.

The topic of skills audits remains an under-researched topic in the training and human resource development literature. To date, limited studies have been carried out examining their use and effectiveness. This paper sheds light on a topic worthy of exploration in the field.

Argues that cultural influences may not only affect a professional’s implicit concept of what constitutes effective practice, but may also affect researchers’ explicit theories. Suggests that this means that many HRD practices, processes, procedures and language are specific to cultures. Explores some of the reasons underlying the increasing importance placed on cultural issues by multinational companies, touching on a number of theoretical and epistemological debates. Draws no firm conclusions but attempts to locate various positions and boundaries on the universalism‐relativism continuum.

This paper seeks to unlock the career transitions of hospitality managers through applying Schein’s career anchors theory. It seeks to understand how Schein’s Career Anchors help explain the career transitions of managers in the Scottish hospitality industry.

The paper adopts a non-sequential multi-method design. All 22 hospitality managers who participated in the study completed an online version of Schein’s Career Anchors containing 40 items covering all eight career anchors. The career histories of participants were then gathered through use of a semi-structured interview. Comparisons were then drawn across the career anchor classification and the data on career transitions collected from participants.

The results highlight the continued relevance of Schein’s career anchors theory and indicate that Schein’s career anchors theory may constitute a useful tool for understanding hospitality managers’ career needs and engaging in meaningful career planning.

The study provides a useful insight into hospitality managers’ career motivations, and knowledge of career anchors will help hospitality organisations more effectively engage, recruit and retain hospitality managers.

The use of competency frameworks as a basis for workplace learning initiatives is now relatively commonplace in organisations. This is reflected in the emphasis given to competencies in the HRD literature. However, the terrain of the competency discussion is somewhat ill‐defined. This article attempts to define the context within which the value of competencies as a basis for workplace learning can be considered and discusses the philosophical and epistemological perspectives found in much of the literature. Competency definition and competency measurement issues are explored, as is a range of other issues concerning the value of competencies in a workplace learning context. The article concludes that, in the interests of clarity, consistency and reliability of measurement, consensus needs to be reached on the basic parameters and definition of competency.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on diversity training and examine the effect of power, privilege and politics on diversity in organisations.

This is a conceptual paper examining the arguments in favour and against diversity training in organisations. It identifies the presence of dominant groups in society leading to the marginalisation and oppression of minority diverse groups. It introduces the papers to the special issue under the three themes of: organisational impacts and outcomes; identify and self‐presentation and resistance to diversity.

The value of diversity training to promoting inclusivity, equality and fairness in organisations is underlined as is the importance of the human resource development community adopting a more proactive role in addressing the issue of diversity through research and course cirricula.

The paper introduces this special issue in “Diversity training in organisations” by examining the background concepts and providing an overview of the contributions to the issue.

This paper explores this relationship between the individual values of managers and human resource (HR) decision‐making.

Questionnaire data were collected from a total of 340 line managers from both Ireland and Canada. The questionnaire instrument comprises three components: Rokeach's instrumental and terminal values instrument; two HR related decision scenarios; and demographic and human capital data.

The results provide modest support for the proposed model that individual values affect HR decision‐making in that capability values were shown to be a significant positive predictor of the importance of health and safety, and peace values were a significant positive predictor of the importance of employment equity.

The findings emphasise the need to simultaneously examine both individual values and organisational factors as predictors of HR decision‐making. Future work should examine the psychometric use of value instruments.

The study underlines the fact that managers need to be aware of the fact that their own values influences how they make decisions. Attention to the values concept amongst managers will improve comprehension of the decision‐making process within organizations.

The value of the paper lies in the fact that the effect of individual values on decision‐making has been under‐researched in the literature.