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Why Some UK Companies are Reluctant to Invest in Training and Development

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Explain why some UK companies are reluctant to invest in training and development. Do you consider these reasons to be valid?

The rapid development of technology and in other areas have led companies’ ability to replicate products more easily, and the rapidly expansion of the service sector has led the nature of consumers to demand high quality at the lowest prices. Both of these highlight the importance of gaining the competitive advantage through the labour force. A method through which a company could obtain this edge, is through training and development of their various skills. Its implementation and management concerns many concepts, esoteric and thus hard to emulate. Training and development can have many benefits …show more content…

Training was also seen to enhance job motivation under certain conditions: there was a practical use to the training and this had been clearly depicted to them (Heyes, Stuart).

Alternatives to T&D are to poach employees from other rivals, or acquire employees through the expensive recruitment and selection process who has the requisite skills required- premium must be paid.
The former is a large barrier to the T&D initiative as the benefits accrue to the company and the employee. The rival can potentially poach your trained employees. This is known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, due to which many companies in the UK do not invest in human resource development (Sisson, Storey). The use of temporary or outsourced employees will not only be harder to train as they may deemed unworthy of investment due to their movement ability, they may be not able to provide the high quality service. Though companies outsourcing their call centres seem to be providing them the necessary service. But these operators in India cannot replicate the highly customer orientated service that British call centres can provide i.e. speaking to Yorkshire people in their own dialects- this would require training. Employees are going to become trained whether the initiative is taken or not as with time they will gain tacit knowledge and they will pick things up ‘by sitting next to Nellie’ over time. This is very inefficient, and a focused

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