Training and development are perhaps the most important part of any human resource department of any company whether it’s manufacturing unit or finance company or retail company and every employee has to go through training and development. Training and development program of employees can be compared with giving water to tree, just like without water a tree will not grow and eventually it will die in the same way without training and development employees will not grow and eventually their knowledge will be outdated and they will be of no use to company. In order to understand both the terms better let’s look at some of the differences between training and development –
Training and Development Differences
- The first and foremost difference between training and development is that while training is given to every employee of the company whereas development program is carried out for few selected candidates of the company only.
- Training is given to employees only for carrying out basic day to day activities of the company and it is generally imparted to those people who have joined the company recently whereas development covers wide range of activities and complicated situations and it is generally imparted to those people who have been in the company since long and have proven their worth to the company.
- Training is given to lower level and lower middle managers as its scope is limited and it involves routine nature of work whereas development is given to top middle managers and top management as its scope is very wide and it is more strategic in nature.
- The idea behind training is to make employees more productive and also improve the quality of output of workers so that company can produce more without sacrificing on the quality of work whereas idea behind development of employees is to make them aware about their true potential and also change in their attitude so that they can contribute towards change in the company which can propel the company to greater heights.
- Training is short term process and typical training program is carried from 3 days to 14 days whereas development program is long term process and in many companies it is carried out over long period of time ranging from 1 month to 1 year as development is a continuous process.
- Training is usually formal in nature in the sense that it is imparted through classroom in the form of presentations, lectures, video or web presentation and many other such ways whereas development is more informal in nature and it includes case studies, live problems and solutions and it is seldom conducted in classrooms which give development program more flexibility.
As one can see from the above that training and development are completely different from each other in terms of objective and purpose for which they are imparted to the employees of the company.