Part 1: Mistakes conducted by CAC’s Training Director

Case study:

Training at the newly open Changi Airport Casino (CAC)  

Singapore’s newly opened 3rd casino, CAC caters to the needs of travellers, tourists, and thrill-seekers on transit or holiday in Singapore. Situated at Changi Airport and directly connected to all terminals via Sky train, CAC employs around 3,000 staff, including 2000 full-time casino dealers, also known as croupiers.

Margaret Chan, CAC’s Director of Gaming Operations, read the email she had just received from Caleb Tan, the company’s Director of Training & Development, and mumbled to herself angrily.

“Not again. I’m not going to let Caleb have his way this round. Last month, he insisted that I must send 100 of my croupiers on a five-day course in customer service, leadership and team building. I had my objections but I sent them anyway. I had to activate croupiers from other shifts just to cover their duties, which caused them unhappiness, higher level of fatigue and a few resignations. This has resulted in more customer complaints and costly mistakes in pay-outs to the players. I would not allow him to tarnish our company’s image in the industry. We need to compete with the other two existing Casinos for a larger pie of the business. After all, many of our croupiers had already been interviewed and selected based on their experience from other regional casinos, so why is there a need for further training?

On their return from training, they grumbled constantly about what a bore it was, and how their time had been wasted because they felt that some of the content was totally irrelevant to their jobs. They had no opportunity to practice those skills anyway due to their working schedules and the nature of their current job. There is no immediate need for the type of training that Caleb has arranged. Now he wants another 100 participants. Well, I am not going to support it anymore. He can just forget about it!”

Part 1

In your own analysis, what possible errors were being made by CAC’s Training Director from the perspective of training needs assessment, transfer of learning and training evaluation?  Mistakes

Error made by director

• Caleb did not conduct a proper need assessment.

• Did not ensure that there is a transfer of learning.

• He did not gather feedback from the participant.

• He did not carry out training evaluation.

What are the consequences?

What will happen?

Part 2

What kinds of recommendations would you propose to the Training Director to ensure that the errors you identified are eliminated?  Solutions

How can he correct the error (recommendation)

• What is involve in need assessment → 3 level of assessment: Organization, person and task analysis (This is how he correct and should conduct)

What must he do? Talk to senior management as able to tell what company need.

• Talk to line manager

• Formative

• Summative

• Of all croupier are ready to train (Motivate)

• Need to learn skill to transfer – Google Casino operation.

Part 3

What effective strategies could the Training Director use to win over the Gaming Operations Director so that she would be more supportive of training for his staff?

Effective strategy to win Gaming Operations Director.

• Explain the purpose of the 3 training programs to Gaming Operations Director.

• Ask Gaming Operations Director for inputs what kind of training is suitable for croupiers.

• Caleb – Must request the CEO to appoint the gaming operations as trainer.

• We sent in small batches → reduces from 100 to 20 per class

Lack of effective training needs assessments

People are considered the most precious assets of an organisation thus huge amount of investment is made to ensure their training and development needs are met (Wilson, 2005). Training and development also referred to as human resource development and learning and development is a function of human resource management that focuses on enhancing the performance efficiency and effectiveness of an individual or group by planning and implementing required activities (Saks, et al., 2010). This report analyses the case study of training at the new opened Changi Airport Casino (CAC) to identify the mistakes conducted by the company’s director of training and development, recommend appropriate solutions and implement effective training strategies in order to make the training program successful.

The process of designing a training and development program can be divided into five main stages namely, analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation also referred to as ADDIE model (Evans, 2008). This model is the most common model used worldwide by training designers. An in-depth analysis of the case study reveals that the CAC’s Training Director has made some errors while designing the training and development program. In order to develop an effective training program it is essential to identify the who, what, why, when, where and how to training.

Lack of effective training needs assessments: Needs assessment is the first and the most critical activity involved in the creation of a training and development program (Noe, 2013). Training needs assessments involve gathering as much information as possible about organisation’s objectives, learning needs, competencies and skills that are needed to enhance performance efficiency and learning styles of individuals who are to be trained. Needs assessments phase of training and development involve identifying gaps between what exists and what is desired currently and in future (Beebe, et al., 2012). The outcome of needs assessment helps the training developers in finding answers to two most important questions, that is who needs training and what training is actually desired.

In case of CAC the Training Director has not conducted a needs assessment and is assuming that all the employee need the training related to customer service, leadership and team building. Without conducting a needs assessment he is unable to identify who needs the training and in what area. As a consequence of lack of needs assessment the Training Director is unable to understand the exactly learning needs of the employees. He is wasting their productive hours and also creating a negative perception in their minds.

Failure to ensure that there is transfer of learning: Transfer of learning occurs when learning from one context enhances or undermines a related performance in other context (Perkins & Salomon, 1992). The Training Director failed to ensure that the employees who are trained are actually getting enough chances and support to transfer their learning to real life work situations. As a consequence almost all employees will actually forget the concepts learned with few months after training.

Failure to gather feedback from participants: Effective and frequent feedbacks help improving productivity and performance in a continuous manner (Armstrong, 2011). In case of training programs is it essential to ensure that regular feedback is provided as well as received from participants. Effective feedbacks help enhancing employee motivation that then tend to deliver high performance (Bhatia, 2007). In case of CAC the Training Director made no attempts to either provide or receive feedbacks from participants. As a consequence he could not determine the learning experience of the trainees. Employee feedback would have greatly helped him in improving the training and development program in a manner that is fulfilled learners’ needs.

Failure to ensure that there is transfer of learning

Lack of training evaluation: Evaluation is simply defined as the assessment of worth or value (Dahiya & Jha, 2011). It involves planned collection, collation and analysis of information in order to determine the value and worth. Evaluation is not only required at the end of the program but must be performed as an ongoing process throughout the program. It helps ensuring that the program meets its desired goals and objectives at all stages. It can also be referred to as a quality control measure (Miller, 2007). Evaluation at each stage of training program helps ensuring that all requirements are fulfilled.  In case of CAC the Training Director lacked focus on training evaluation. There was no formative or summative evaluation. No assessments were conducted to check that the trainees have actually learned the concepts taught during training. As a consequence he was unable to identify whether the training program was actually meeting learning needs of the employees. He was unable to judge whether or not the training had helped in enhancing employee performance and achieve desired organisation’s objectives. Due to a lack of effective evaluation process in place the Training Director was unable to understand that he actually needed to improve his training program in order to meet the learning needs of the employees.

In order to ensure that the errors made by the CAC’s Training Director is eliminated it is important to ensure that he conducts proper needs assessments, ensure there is transfer of learning and have an effective evaluation system in place.

Needs Assessment: The Training Director of CAC must ensure that he conducts all the three levels of needs assessment namely, organisational analysis, individual analysis and task analysis (Aspin, 2008). Organisational analysis will help him identify the level of effectiveness of the organisation and determine its training needs and how the training will be conducted (Boud, et al., 2006).  Organisational analysis helps identifying the environmental impact, economical stability and its impact on operations cost, impact of technological changes, impact of changes in workforce demographics and whether or not the organisation is meeting its desired goals and objectives. Individual analysis will help the Training Director in identifying individual learning needs that can help them improve their work performance and also determine what kind of training will be needed to meet individual learning needs.(Snell & Bohlander, 2012). Performance evaluation, observation, surveys, questionnaires are some of the source that can help the training director collection information needed for individual analysis. Task analysis help gathering information about a job or set of jobs and identifying skills, knowledge, attitude and abilities needed to achieve high performance efficiency (Truss, et al., 2012). Job description, KSA analysis, performing the job and analysis of literature related to job are some of the ways that can help the training director in performing task analysis. By performing these three level of assessments the training director will be able to effectively analyse the who, what, why, when, where and how of a training program.

Transfer of Learning: Before the training starts the training director should make proper arrangements in order to ensure that trainees are provided with enough opportunities to use the concepts they have learned during training hours (Evans, 2008). Training Director must ensure that a positive transfer climate is created within the workplace which helps creating a strong alignment between organisational goals and training program. He should ensure that the employees are motivated enough to transfer their learning to their workplace. In order to motivate employees and ensure their readiness the training director should provide complete and realistic information before training, should ensure proper feedback system is in place to get employees input and should effectively communicate company’s expectations to the employees (Armstrong, 2011). He must ensure the training is relevant and a culture of learning is created. He should speak to the senior management and the line managers in order to ensure that trainees receive complete support from the management team. He must ensure that trainees have enough skills to transfer their learning to casino operations.

Failure to gather feedback from participants

Evaluation: Evaluation should happen as an ongoing process and not only at the end of the training program (Dahiya & Jha, 2011). He should focus on both formative and summative evaluation in order to ensure the training program is improved continuously to meet employees learning needs. He should take employee assessments on regular basis to ensure they are actually understanding the concepts and benefiting from it.

All these measures will help the Training Director ensure that all the errors he made in first training session will be eliminated form future ones.

In order to make the training and development program a success it is important that the Training Director gets support from the Gaming Operations Director. He should effectively communicate the need for training related to customer service, leadership and team building to the Gaming Operations Director. He should clearly inform her value of such trainings and how they can help improving employee performance at the casino. The Training Director should make ask the Gaming Operations Director to provide feedback as to what kind of training, knowledge and skills are needed by the employees in order to enhance their productivity and performance. He can also try if the CEO can ask the Gaming Operations Director to become the trainer for her employees which will further motivate them to transfer their learning in day to day operations. The Training Director can also try conducting the training within small batches of 20 employees instead of 100 employees and also reduce the number of training days to 3 instead of 5. Doing this will not disturb day to day operations of the casino due to shortage of workforce and the Gaming Operations Director will not have that much trouble substituting for small number of employee for less days.

The training Director can also try using e-learning as a way for training the employees. With e-learning facility employee will be able to learn at their own pace. To do so the Training Director can set up training committee and also ask the Gamings Operations Director to be a part of it. He should focus on creating awareness about training department by applying marketing strategies. He should ensure that the role of training department is clear to other departments and to employees.

Conclusion

Effective training and development programs help ensuring that the available resources possess the needed skills and competences to help the organisation remain competitive in today’s dynamic marketplace. It is a complex process and must pass through a set of steps in order to ensure that it is beneficial for the individual and the organisation as a whole. Effective needs assessments, transfer of learning and evaluation help the trainer ensure that the trainees are engaged enough and their actual learning needs are met.

References

Armstrong, M., (2011) Armstrong’s Handbook of Strategic Human Resource Management. London: Kogan Page Publishers.

Aspin, D. N., (2008) Philosophical Perspectives on Lifelong Learning. Hamburg: Springer Science & Business Media.

Beebe, S. A., Mottet, T. P. & Roach, K. D., (2012) Training and Development: Communicating for Success. New York: Prentice Hall PTR.

Bhatia, S., (2007) Strategic Human Resource Management : Winning Through People. New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications.

Boud, D., Cressey, P. & Docherty, P., (2006) Productive Reflection at Work: Learning for Changing Organizations. New Jersey: Routledge.

Dahiya, S. & Jha, A., (2011) Review of Training Evaluation. International Journal of Computer Science and Communication, 2(1), pp. 11-16.

Evans, C., (2008) Learning styles in education and training. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.

Miller, A., (2007) How to Manage Human Resource in Organizations. Maitland: Xulon Press.

Noe, R. A., (2013) Employee Training and Development. Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Perkins, D. N. & Salomon, G., (1992) Transfer of Learning. [Online] Available at: https://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/docs/traencyn.htm[Accessed 2015].

Saks, Saks, A. M., Haccoun, R. R. & Belcourt, M., (2010) Managing Performance Through Training and Development. New York: Cengage Learning.

Snell, S. & Bohlander, G., (2012) Managing Human Resources. New York: Cengage Learning.

Truss, C., Mankin, D. & Kelliher, C., (2012) Strategic Human Resource Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, J. P., (2005) Human Resource Development: Learning & Training for Individuals & Organizations. London: Kogan Page Publishers.