Does What They Want Matter? Effects of Needs-based Education on New Employee Training of Korean Government

The purpose of training program for new hires is to help new hires learn information about and adapt to new jobs, roles, and cultures of their organizations (Fisher, 1986; Klein & Weaver, 2000; Van Maanen & Schein, 1979). New... [ view full abstract ]

The purpose of training program for new hires is to help new hires learn information about and adapt to new jobs, roles, and cultures of their organizations (Fisher, 1986; Klein & Weaver, 2000; Van Maanen & Schein, 1979). New hires have different, diverse backgrounds, and to be effective, organizations need their employees to have attitudes, skills or norms necessary to the organizations. New hires become organizational men through organizational socialization in which new hires learns what their organization want them to be (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979), and training for new hires is a central means of the organizational socialization.

A number of studies find multiple benefits resulted from training. Research has been conducted at the individual, organizational, and society level, and their findings suggest that effective training is likely to improve individual and organizational job performance as well as labor and human capital which in turn contributes to national economic growth.

To develop effective training, needs of both organizations and trainees must be understood and analyzed.(Taylor & O’Driscoll, 1998). According to Taylor and O’Driscoll (1998, 29), needs assessment is “the most crucial time for establishing links between training and results because initial decisions are made concerning what training will be provided in organizations.” As a result, it is important to check if trainees' needs are embedded in the training program, and this study aims at empirically investigating how much important needs-embedded trainings are to the positive evaluation on training effectiveness.

To meet the goal of this research, a curriculum of new leader development program which is provided to middle-level public officials in Korean central government will be analyzed. In addition, middle-level public officials who are on training will be surveyed to check the discrepancies between their needs and the contents of curriculum. This study expects that the trainees will have positive satisfaction with their training program if they find less discrepancy between their needs and the actual contents of training programs that they receive.

This study expects that outcomes of this study will help HRD scholars as well as practitioners in better designing training programs for effective results.