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Malvezzi, 2015
Industrial Psychology
University of San Carlos
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Training
Section I
The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Training, Development, and Performance Improvement, First Edition. Edited by Kurt Kraiger, Jonathan Passmore, Nuno Rebelo dos Santos, and Sigmar Malvezzi. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The History of Training
Sigmar Malvezzi
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Introduction
Training is an age-old activity broadly applied to support humankind’s process of adaptation to the world. Adaptation is a condition of humans that requires the development of the skills of individuals. Individuals are not born with the internal instruments they will require for their adaptation but have to develop them out of their many potentialities (Baxter, 1982). Human potentialities are developed into skills through the various means available to them such as routines, experiences, education, and training. Among those tools of development, training became the most commonly applied to the professional need of adaptation. Correlated to the open-ended human condition and dependent on knowledge and technology, training has developed into a heterogeneous activity, carried out through a wide variety of means and deployed to an almost infinite number of human functions. The study of an object endowed with an identity so vaguely outlined as to its contents, functions, and boundaries as is training, aligns the researcher with those of the sciences whose objects of study are hardly reproducible for observation. Its grasp requires scrutiny of its institutionalization as a historical development to expose its open-ended condition, and the evolution of its identity, functions, and boundaries. Historical study is always a helpful path to the unveiling of the articulation of complex social, technological, and economic contexts functioning much like a stage on which the different social, cultural, technological, and economic factors at play may be observable. In the case of training, the conditions it has had available for the achievement of its aims, and the many circumstances in which it has been applied, have evolved and made its observation and the interfaces it has built with work and society complex. Thus the study of the history of training is a fertile path for the understanding of its needs, structures, systems, and tools. Grounded in that potentiality, the analysis of the history of training’s institutionalization is taken as the objective of this chapter.
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deployment in the arts, sports, economic production, social life, professional qualification, driving, war, and many other fields of activity disclose the broad range of faces and shapes it presents and the role it plays in human adaptation to the world. By creating the identity of a regulating and emancipating agent dependent on the evolution of civilization, training exposes the openness of the human condition. Human beings are open-ended individuals constituted by almost countless kinds of potentialities, which to be useful require transformation into effective competences. They are always dependent on the building, broadening, and sustaining of biological and subjective structures to enable them to achieve the aims they pose for themselves both individually and collectively. Through the development of their potentialities into compe- tences, human beings are instrumentalized to attain an almost infinite range of goals the achievement of which out of the properties of the material world is grounded in “making by art.” Competences are the outcome of continuous learning to adapt, build new skills, and sustain those previously acquired. Training is the activity through which competences are produced by its potentiality to organize human development. Although endowed with that potentiality, training is not a “factotum,” but has limitations, as everybody can see in its ineffectiveness on the development of elderly people. Old age is a time of life in which, by reason of a person’s biological condition, potentialities are diminished and training is of limited effect in its capacity to develop many competences and thus to play its role in enabling older individuals to adapt fully to the world. Being one of the main human tools for adaptation to the world, training is a kind of power potentially available to everybody but also potentially inaccessible to many individuals. The inaccessibility to training com- promises the sustainability of adaptation of many individuals and communities. Just as happened with other services and institutions such as trading, taxes, and economic production, in early societies, training was an ever-present activity, calling for effective performance and regulated by community traditions and social and even reli- gious systems. Before the creation of guilds and the industrial era, training was an active power the visibility of which was limited to the sports, arts, and warfare. In other fields training was integrated into the routine of life as a part of it. In general, training applied to work was understood, regulated, and conducted within and by the community’s life routine as part of the process of secondary socialization. The development of individuals’ skills enabling them to live and to work required little systematic knowledge and was managed in the light of the community’s practical experiences. Every community member was entitled and obliged to learn the common basic techniques of routine social life and the fundamental means of survival. This learning was undertaken through the process of socialization and in most cases located in the realms of the family’s duties. Accordingly, in medieval Britain every father had to start training his male offspring in the art of archery, just as girls were trained in sewing. Anthropological studies of indigenous communities reveal their training activities within social structures and life regulations (Wallman, 1979). In the primitive Inca civilization every individual had to engage in agricultural activity dur- ing the first part of the day and could engage in crafts during the rest of the day. Through that differentiated work engagement new members were able to learn most of the ordin- ary techniques required for that people’s adaptation and survival. Those individuals who did not engage in the agricultural tasks were considered outcasts. The training received during those activities, chiefly agricultural skills, was mediated by the community’s tradi- tions and their entire social system. That traditional community control of training has steadily declined since the intro- duction of industrialization. The split between work and family life in the industrial era removed training activities from the realm and control of the latter, transforming their design, costs, and regulation into a rational action requiring scientific knowledge,
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managerial coordination, and economic resources. The outcome of that evolution from community to rational control reached such a point at the turn of the twenty-first century that most enterprises found themselves unable to take on their workers’ skilled training as required for the achievement of the goals in view. Today, to develop working skills indi- viduals have to enroll in schools and sometimes to buy training as an outsourced resource from various specialized organizations, such as professional bodies. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the development of workers’ skills related to the prevailing tech- nologies transformed training into a complex activity requiring multiple competencies drawn from various fields of specialized knowledge. These conditions fostered the creation of specialized training organizations capable of designing and applying training projects in partnership with industries, airlines, hotels, and any other kind of organization. Besides its evolution as a complex activity, training became big economic business. Training is a finan- cially expensive activity but a necessary means for the sustainability and quality of busi- nesses and therefore ended up as a mandatory item in the strategic and financial planning of most organizations. In times of fierce economic competition and highly sophisticated production technologies, training emerges as a paradox because it is a crucial requirement of competition and an expensive resource. The management of training thus requires special care on the part of enterprises.
The Origin of Training
Since World War I, the word “training” has been a popular item in everyday vocabulary to express a routine activity common to the professional experience of most adults. It bears an intuitive meaning of the development of skills often associated with education, profes- sions, and sports. In general terms, “training” describes actions such as the intentional and organized development of skills, purposeful learning, formal preparation, professional upgrading, and the development of human potentialities. It appeared in the English lan- guage around the fifteenth century to express and communicate the idea of instructing, developing, and teaching, probably taken from an earlier sense of disciplining, or bringing something into a desired form. The main hypothesis drawn by historians presumes that the word originated from the performance of rural growers arranging branches and vines in a desired position or shape and was applied by analogy to human performance. Practical exercises, verbal instructions, and observation of the environment have always existed as an essential part of life. These were spontaneous instrumental activities integrated into the processes of primary and secondary socialization, education, and the integration of all kinds of newcomers. Children and adolescents were admitted within adult groups through the acquisition of language, behavioral patterns, and rituals of interaction with adults in a spontaneous and intuitive but complex kind of training. As society evolved, complex and rapid tasks stemming from emerging technologies were developed, and as these required not only specific skills but synergy between several performers, training evolved pari passu with the increasing complexity of the process of production of goods and services. Throughout that evolution, training itself became a realm of specific technologies leading to the creation of an ample repertoire of instrumentalities. The training techno- logies within primitive community life consisted mainly of the elaboration and communi- cation of narratives, the observation of others making things, and the on-the-job-training of working together or solo whether or not under the supervision of another trained individual. The objective was simply the transference of traditions and knowledge from older people to youngsters and newcomers. The traditions developed by assimilating new technologies – such as that involved in the preparation of the stained glass windows of
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Pompillius, the second king of Rome, to whom he attributes the creation of a new model of teaching in small groups of people. He organized the teaching of skills in the shape of lessons to groups of youngsters, just as society has institutionalized it in schools nowadays. According to Plutarch, Numa Pompillius invested in that initiative because he sought the development of the new city of Rome. To support this achievement he instituted classes, and organized their pedagogical activities and the teachers for them (see Plutarch, 1952). He hoped, as a result of that initiative, to qualify skilled workers to construct the new city. The novelty described in that record is Numa Pompillius’s concern with the general organ ization of the students, their relation to their masters, and pedagogical activity as an effective means for the transmission of expertise. That kind of strategy later appears in more complex fields of knowledge, such as the development of navigation in Portugal in the year 1417. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese prince Dom Henrique founded and sponsored the School of Sagres, in the south of Portugal. That school is another evidence of a step forward in the slow institutionalization of training. The main mission given to that school was the preparation of sailors for the purpose of boosting Portuguese overseas domination. Prince Dom Henrique enlisted expert sailors, craftsmen, cartographers, and thinkers and brought them together to develop the art of navigation by the mutual complementation of each other’s knowledge and expertise aim- ing at the training of new sailors. That group built caravels, replotted routes, developed sailors’ competences, and sent them to sea on several expeditions. To that school is to be attributed Portugal’s success in its discoveries of the fifteenth century. Although many do not accept that example of entrepreneurship as a school, it was, nonetheless, recognized as a kind of laboratory for the study of the sailing business and technology as well as the qual- ification of new sailors. The School of Sagres reveals an awareness of the fact that sailing could not be as effective as it might be if technology and training were not integrated into a unified rational architecture. It may be seen that in that experience the concept of the sailor-apprentice and his intentional training were directly related to a strategic dimension of investments in future discoveries. At this point of its institutionalization training discloses its potentialities to evolve pari passu with society. Its early stage discloses the mere deployment of potentialities; the next step reveals the awareness of the need of competences and the exploration of training to develop them. The following step shows the transformation of the awareness and needs into plans to exploit and integrate the development of potentialities according to long-term projects for the advance of society. Notwithstanding the slow pace of its development, in the period of the discoveries training already possessed both visibility as a differentiat- ing factor in society and increasing importance as an instrument of social, political, and economic achievement. Both the visibility and importance of training emerge clearly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Fostered by the expansion of trade, training was a general concern materialized in the attempts to organize the development of skills and apprenticeships. From that point onwards, every new experience dedicated to the trans- mission of expertise contributed to the gradual institutionalization of training given its first impulse by the guild, which was the emblematic feature of the preindustrial era and was later consolidated by the conditions created in the industrial context. The greater the regulation of the production of goods in the quest for business speed and complexity, the greater became the complexity and regulations of training, a feature that materialized its institutionalization. Although guilds were a significant step forward in the institutionali- zation of training, industries consolidated that process by offering endless opportunities for qualitative leaps in its expansion, regulation, and capabilities. If those two steps are compared, guilds were advanced institutions but still organized within the contingencies of the medieval context in which the boundaries between social systems and rational action
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in the regulation of training were intertwined. Industries created particular conditions that enhanced the distance between social systems and the rational action.
The Emergence of Medieval Guilds
The origin of guilds is a matter of well-known controversy. Guilds were the advanced stage of the evolution of the collegia of Roman culture under the form of professional associa- tions. They were quite popular in the European sixth century for butchers, fishermen, merchants, artists, weavers, shoemakers, and many other sorts of business (Muniz, 1975). Guilds became not only a source of wealth and labor but also an effective means for the training of new professionals. Their organization was regulated in such detail that they expose to view a primitive but already institutionalized model of training. Guilds integrated two broad objectives: the production of goods and the training of apprentices. In brief, guilds were institutions that hired youngsters to put them into a kind of on-the-job training. Within that model, apprentices were admitted between 12 and 15 years old, lived in the workshops under the guidance and control of the master, and there lived out a prim- itive form of professional career. The guild masters had full authority over the apprentices much like parental power such that on occasion they could even apply physical punish- ment. The apprentices would only start with the small, simple tasks of the particular craft, or were merely limited to the cleaning of tools and the workshop. Quite often their fam- ilies had to pay for their training before they started to merit their own wages. The training could take two years as in the case of cooking or last even a decade depending on the nature of the craft concerned and on the apprentice’s results. The average duration of training was about seven years, as Adam Smith (1981) registered it. Beginning with cleaning, observation, and small tasks, apprentices were given progressively more complex work according to their ability. There were no formal appraisals, nor written guidance, or books. Most of the exercise of the profession was guided and regulated by codes and social norms. Guilds were a successful model that came to be reproduced not only all over Europe but also transplanted to European colonies overseas. In the guilds, the apprentices were classified by degrees of ability. The first step in the training was a role termed trainee from which the apprentice could be promoted to jour- neyman and then, finally, to master – the last stage or highest point in the professional hierarchy. The schooling of trainees consisted of the performance of tasks under the mas- ter’s guidance. In general, the trainee was not entitled to wages and had no tools of his own. At a certain stage in his apprenticeship, the trainee could be promoted to journey- man. The latter was a professional who mastered most of the technology and could work without the immediate supervision of the master. He could possess tools bought with the money he earned from his work. He was entitled to the position of master and actually promoted to it when he proved by the production of an “opera prima” that he was in fact an expert in that particular craft. As a master the individual was entitled to leave the shop and attempt to organize his own workshop in accordance with the rules and codes of the association of the particular place in which he lived. One of the main features that turned guilds into a significant step forward in the institu- tionalization of training was the development of a culture of the organization of training by the institution of rules, discipline, hierarchy, and procedures. That culture was an important element in the removal of training from the control of traditions and social systems by subjecting it to a need for both technical and business regulation. Guilds were a kind of specialized cell of the social texture subject to the social system but contextual- ized as a space in which it was possible to work under specific conditions legitimized by
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created the trajectory of engineered, repetitive, and fragmented tasks, which went on evolving into the mechanization, the automation, the robotic, and then the teleworking linking fragmented production stations. The initial intermediation of machines easily expanded its realms to the mediation of informational intelligent systems within net- worked enterprises. That evolution imposed new demands of adaptation to both work and the working life for which training became a crucial resource that ended up institution- alized as an activity as complex as the very organization of production itself. The onset of the industrial era can be tracked from the invention of the “factory system” (Hobsbawm, 1987) in the early eighteenth century. That new way of production became the seed of potentialities and structures that were later developed into organizations out of which virtual enterprises have emerged in the twenty-first century.
The industrial system emerged on the basis of the “factory system,” a form of work organization, not a new technology. At the heart of the “factory system” were the following features: fencing of the factory and the imposition of control over the access or departure ... the allocation where possible, of fixed geographical working points ... a detailed division of labor. (Emmery, 1982)
Probably, the pioneers of the factory system had not envisaged the high potentiality and necessity of training as a crucial factor of production and productivity effectiveness. At the onset of industries, management pioneers did not recognize training as a crucial link in that new compound nor were they concerned with the need of any special managerial care of the process of adaptation. Training’s contribution to the success of production and of services sprang up gradually in correlation with the demands of skills stemmed from the technological and managerial development of industries. In the first stages of the factory system, workers were recruited and hired by the fore- men or by intermediary agents who assigned tasks to them and provided the raw materials they required either to work within the plant or at home as ways of mass production. The hiring of workers was carried out under the contracts and rules imported from the guilds and the artisan shops. When hired, workers had to accomplish the tasks assigned to them under the rule of “swim or sink,” without any systemic activity to prepare and adapt them to tasks. Recruiters presumed that the hired workers were skilled weavers, potters, carpenters, spinners, metalworkers, or experienced manpower in some other craft and were thus able to learn and to perform the new tasks assigned to them in the factory. There are records of foremen spending some time teaching their team, but that attention on the part of the supervisor was not organized, nor obligatory and not even regular. Impelled by factors such as the steady technological evolution and the development of administration, the demand for specialized and accurate performance came to constitute a constant diffi- culty. Recruitment and training were two means whereby solutions could be found. The need for the development of the skills of a larger number of workers to perform accurate and precise tasks was gradually realized and integrated into managerial concerns. Soon the mismatch between the demands of production, the limitations of workers’ competences, and the difficulties encountered in preparing them became apparent and were routine problems on managers’ desks. By the end of the nineteenth century personnel selection and training were two activities recognized as crucial managerial instruments of production effectiveness. They required a rationalization analogous to that of the managerial care of the production line. The recog- nition of the contribution of recruitment and training to performance effectiveness turned managers’ eyes towards the search for ways to skill workers. From the turn of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, there are records of managerial initiatives aimed at
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the skilling of workers. Gradually these initiatives have become integrated into managerial routines and have undergone improvements born from the experience of their implementa- tion. Various scattered actions to recruit and train workers during the nineteenth century shaped the institutionalization of personnel management as part of the hierarchical struc- ture through the gradual organization of regularities in each of its services. In the course of that process, although solutions grounded in intuition were still quite frequent, the demand for the rationalization of those services brought systematic and scientific knowledge into personnel management. That demand fostered the alliance between enterprises and the academy creating a partnership that was already visible by the close of the nineteenth century. The integration of thinkers and makers in the search to adapt workers to their tasks stimulated the development of articulated actions capable of managing the development of workers’ skills. It was one of the main features of the institutionalization of training. One of the pioneer training initiatives was the gathering of small groups of workers in classrooms distant from the shop floor where they could be taught how to operate the machines and perform the tasks. That experience proved to be a good tactic in terms of time-saving but not so effective in its main aim:
Since workers were now learning away from the job, they had to remember not only what they had learned in classroom until they could get onto the floor of the production line, but they also had to transfer what they had learned abstractly in the classroom onto a real machine in a real work environment. (Sleight, 1993, p. 3)
Notwithstanding their limitations, the classrooms were deployed and gradually improved, becoming the so-called “vestibule schools,” in the late 1800 s. That step forward “consisted of a room or area set off from the plant floor where workers not only received formal instructions for several days or weeks but also were given hands-on-training in the operation of specific machines or performance of technical tasks” (Kauffman, 2008, p. 128). The “vestibule schools” proved to be an effective means and became a widespread technique for the training of apprentices in factories. The successful experience of the “vestibule schools” fostered their improvement in terms of the better elaboration and design of the content taught to workers and apprentices, thus shaping the training programs. This was specific content to bring to fruitful effect the understanding of tasks and the learning of performances, which were molded into regular activities. These training programs consisted of organized learning trajectories. Soon managers discovered that they only needed to be elaborated once and could then be deployed in other units of production to be replicated to distinct groups of workers. The training programs gave visibility to the workers’ skilling as rational and regular managerial service contingencies that promoted their legitimacy within the young culture of scientific administration. As a comprehensive regular set of activities, programs rapidly proved to be much more effective than the previous intuitive foreman initiatives in preparing newcomers or in helping workers to adapt to the new technologies. The success and visibility of these programs soon led to the inclusion of training in budgets and in the list of issues discussed at meetings where mana- gerial plans were elaborated. Training programs became a common practice and gradually were identified with the very training activity thus giving visibility to the institutionalization of the professional qualification. The institutionalized training presented after World War I had been shaped in the late nineteenth century through the consolidation of those scattered initiatives with the support of some measure of scientific knowledge. The gradual shaping of training together with other activities dedicated to the fitting of performances to tasks such as recruitment, selection, career paths, and rewards as rational managerial actions, built the differentiation of personnel management as a specialized and
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YMCA created their Industrial Department to bridge the gap between youngsters and the manpower requirements of the railroads of the United States. Its aim was to expand its welfare work into the realm of industry. YMCA’s initiative was so successful that by there were almost 100 YMCA facilities serving various industries, not only the railroads (Kaufman, 2008). At that point, the need for training had become a key concept in managerial and academic concerns, the achievement of which was accomplished through the definition of learning targets. Schools and personnel management started to design trajectories aimed at the development of workers’ and apprentices’ skills both for implementation in schools as a propaedeutic action and in organizations as part of the managerial duty of adaptation of performances to tasks. The training programs whether undertaken in schools or on the shop floor reinforced training’s identity as a necessary service, linked to personnel management, to science, to the educational system, and to organizational effectiveness. Programs became a kind of mandatory instrument for the materialization of training and had expanded their deployment not only to shop-floor workers but also to the skil- ling of foremen and managers. That expansion of the realms of training activities led to the perception of the complexity of skilling and the understanding of human abilities. Through the 1920s and 1930s various research projects were undertaken and several the- ories emerged in that field reinforcing the need for the scientific approach to training and providing more evidence for its legitimacy. Notwithstanding their consolidation and scientific support, the elaboration of training programs created tensions within both academia and the managerial field. Organizational demands and the programs developed in schools and in factories did not always match exactly because industries were evolving from manual to “all round mechanical” work. The technology shifted skilled craftwork to broadly previously defined minimally differen- tiated machine-tending tasks requiring only unskilled or semiskilled manpower (Douglas, 1921). Those mismatches revealed the existence of distinct paces between training and labor demands. Training programs and chiefly schools moved at a conservative pace while the shop floor was a locus of continuous innovation. Besides that technical aspect within industries, many schools were not prepared to adopt the target of training apprentices as enterprises required them to do. That mismatch brought out the need for broader actions than just technical modifications of syllabuses and programs. Along with programs and professional schools, the institutionalization of training took another step forward impelled by managerial endeavor to link it to negative events such as turnover and manpower shortage, which posed serious difficulties for the regularity of pro- duction. Training and personnel selection were together envisaged as preventive instru- ments to overcome those difficulties. At the beginning of the twentieth century training was conceived of as a good tool to prepare for the replacement of incompetent workers as this testimony of Taylor’s gives evidence:
It becomes the duty of those on the management’s side to deliberately study the character, the nature and the performance of each workman with a view to finding out his limitation, on one hand but even more important, his possibilities for development, on the other hand; and as deliberately and as systematically, to train and teach this workman, giving him, wherever it is possible those opportunities for advancement which will enable him to do the highest and most interesting and most profitable calls of work for which his natural abilities fit him. (Taylor, 1947, p. 256)
This testimony shows the visibility of training’s potentialities as a resource that could be considered in management’s routine concern for the adaptation of workers to tasks. The
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achievement of those potentialities deepened the shaping of the identity of training and therefore of its institutionalization as part of management and as part of society with impacts whose effect extends beyond factory boundaries. The broad deployment of all those skilling activities already under the control of the academy and management fostered the vision of training as a technology conceived much as engineering was and as such treated as a commodity that could be bought and sold. The quest and deployment of those programs and models were not limited to the industrialized world but contaminated business management wherever the “factory system” was applied. Even then unindustrialized countries such as Brazil, where railroads were being built, required that kind of managerial technology that was imported from Europe through the hiring of foreign engineers. That conception of training as a resource that could be found readymade somewhere made its deployment an easier and legitimate action much as was the purchase of any other tech- nology. The conception of training as technology was first proposed by William Stern, a German psychologist and philosopher who invented the word psychotechnique in 1903 to express the emerging experimental research on work and its deployment in schools and professional settings (Carroy, Ohayon, & Plas, 2006, p. 119). A new word is a helpful means to foster the institutionalization of a resource like training that, seen as a com- modity, could be transferred from one enterprise to another. All those developments contributed to the recognition of a new area of knowledge which, integrating distinct fields of science around the same question, was a complex issue whose handling required the cooperation of several expertises. That emergent field of research dedicated to the validation of professional practices reinforced the visibility and identity of training by establishing it as an object of scientific investigation and of managerial systemization. Education for work could not be effectively accomplished by intuitive knowledge nor controlled by social systems and traditions but should be taken as a field of science to feed the institutions in charge of society’s management and economic production. That consolidation of training as a crucial element of management and a complex issue in scientific knowledge impacted broadly in the reshaping of professional boundaries and in public policies. That consolidation progressed in such a way that after World War I training was no longer an issue restricted to the four walls of factories but a general topic investigated by academics, handled by managers, taken into consideration by workers’ associations, and regulated by public administration. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, training had its identity and institutionalization recognized by academic literature, by schools, by workers’ associations, and by governments, as seen in the many initiatives taken to regulate it and to foster its expansion and improvement as the analysis of the case of France gives some evidence. In France, an industrialized county for more than a century, training’s institutionaliza- tion stimulated the integration of endeavors to promote the development of work skills, a fact that deepened its enrichment and investigation. The work of several psychologists pioneered the complementarity of those institutions in the promotion and development of training. Binet, Ribot, Lahy, Buisson, and Henri were researchers whose investiga- tions contributed significantly to the development of training in their country through their attempts to understand skills and their learning in distinct contexts such as schools and workplaces. Through distinct initiatives they realized that it was possible, in all the phases from infancy to adult life, to improve the learning process of abilities by applying the results of research to the learners (Carroy, Ohayon, & Plas, 2006, p. 99). That belief opened the eyes of managers and government to the need for investment in the investi- gation of performance and the development of skills. The good results of the application of the findings of new sciences in professional contexts awoke an important echo among both researchers and practitioners. Training was favored by those studies not only from
The History of Training 27
capabilities and seen to have an identity easily differentiated from that of other services also required for and related to adaptation, such as socialization, education, selection, motiva- tion, and appraisal. Training was another component of society heard of in primary social- ization even before the beginning of professional life. Most people knew the meaning of the word training intuitively, used it in their daily discourse, and were aware of its main locus, potentialities, values, and the high probability of experiencing it in their own way. After World War II, the generalized application of training revealed its coming of age as a service clearly autonomous of and complementary to other services related to adaptation. Training was an available and regular public resource, which should be applied for the sake of the effectiveness of the various activities of society with the aim of ensuring both the individual’s ordinary as well as his special capabilities. From that level of recognition and appliance, training evolved – maximizing its potentialities, sophisticating its instrumental- ity, enriching the values it could add to society, and achieving the status of a compulsory path for the legal exercise of many activities. The recognition of that level of maturity and of its fundamental contribution made training a valuable asset in regard to strategic issues, a step forward that put it into the big business by which specialized enterprises create and plan, implement, assess, and develop training projects.
Training at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
Since the theory of systems and the computer were introduced into organizations in the early 1950s, the demands for adaptation to managerial evolution have steadily increased. The answer to those demands found in training a service already available as a mature institution that could be shaped to and deployed on behalf of different programs, targets, conditions, loci, and approaches. Training was a tool already at hand for managers and available to academic research as a trustworthy activity in its potentialities for adaptation, able to contribute to the qualification of adequate work performance. The necessary mediation of training for effective performance was no longer in doubt, nor was its locus in the personnel management structure, but it had pervaded other institutions like government and schools. From that point in its evolution, training was set in an endlessly increasing differentiation of its own structure and agency in its adaptation to the pace of a broad demand for skills – as was later to be observed in the role it played in its implementation for semi-autonomous teams, quality circles, organizational development, and the like in the 1960s and 1970s. That differentiation was observed from east to west in enterprises and other kinds of organization consolidating training’s identity as an open-ended and mandatory instrument related to the regulation of work performance and individual emancipation. From the experience of its broad deployment, which ranged from sophisticated strategic business plans to high performance in sports and arts, training was remolded in its contents, functions, and boundaries, as earlier mentioned, in a way that made it difficult to describe it as a serialized instrument. The potentialities found in training confirmed once again the open-ended character of the human condition and the range of tasks to which people could be adapted. As such a rich and highly mature institu- tion, training was able to offer adequate service for the needs of both beginners and experts, for complex and routine performances and for short- and long-term adaptations, thus becoming highly differentiated along with its general deployments. The conditions to which work performance had to adapt in the tele-information era exposed training to harder challenges that gained momentum at the beginning of the twenty-first century when society and particularly business were moved by the confluence of the virtualization of “making,” digital technology, and economic fragmentation. Under these conditions,
28 Training
training faced the challenge of having to qualify workers for constantly varying demands of skills. Within that new grammar people have to interact with invisible processes of pro- duction, to decide under and react to high-speed patterns of performance, absorb new technologies, and work in interdependent relationships with other performers. Training has met that challenge by amplifying the diversity of its actions and means as evidenced by and clearly expounded in the several chapters of this book. Under that grammar, business management became a continuous movement of artic- ulation, change, differentiation, integration, qualification, projection, and assessment. The adaptation of performance to that grammar turned the understanding of skills into a more complex issue by the difficulties stemmed from the integration of mental, social, and motor operations, cross-referencing judgments, entrepreneurship, self-designed tasks, and the management of synergy with others. These requirements – more to be expected of gods or supermen – fostered the differentiation of training in its targets, instruments, and boundaries, impacting the need for distinct expertise for trainers. Today, many workers in realms such as those of finance, security, and strategy face demands for skills analogous to those required by the character Pi in the beautiful Ang Lee movie The Life of Pi (2012). Pi had to coexist with Richard Parker, a carnivorous tiger on a boat adrift at sea. It would be hard, even for a training expert, to anticipate the set of skills that the adaptation to that situation would require. Pi had to be a resilient entrepreneur of the development of his own skills to succeed in facing the threat of his coexistence with Richard Parker. Analogously, many workers today have to be resilient builders of their own skills, just as Pi had to be. Accordingly, training is not limited to institutionalized activities but emerges as a set of tasks shared by personnel management and the autonomous individual’s action – as has been well documented in the recent lit- erature of career development. The skills required for jobs performed within virtualized fast activities, with a high level of autonomy and interwoven with several protagonists, are the significant challenge for training today, because they cannot be easily discriminated nor differentiated one from the other. Many jobs require the adaptation of workers to a sequence of unforeseen sur- prises – as seen in Pi’s adventure. Today, a common challenge of training programs is that of the preparation of workers to deploy distinct skills in the face of the need for the rapid understanding of the context within which they perform, the skills for which they have to craft just as Pi had to create the tasks from a restricted range of materials. Under these working conditions, training emerges as a creative instrument to consider adaptation as a kind of continuous necessity that can never be considered adequate because the needs to which it has to respond are molded and remolded in accordance with the constant changes of the context. This adaptation to oscillating needs stemming from contexts under the metamorphosis of emergent properties requires high levels of differentiation of training itself. The alliance between academia and enterprises continues to enable training to be a reliable tool to meet that demand. The leap taken by training in its evolution from the “vestibule schools” to this highly open-ended demand for programs resulted in the individualized training programs known as coaching. These differentiations suggest that although already institutionalized, training is still a service in progress. The “vestibule schools” were created to serve groups of workers aiming at optimiz- ing the possibility of the serialization of teaching, within a context characterized by the high regularity of the events in view. The serialization succeeded and it is still required for and applied to certain stages and sorts of training. The institutionalization of training during the first half of the twentieth century occurred on the grounds of the poten- tiality of the serialization of learning. More than a century later, as an already mature institution, training moved back to a model more similar to the guilds concerning the
30 Training
On the side of administration, since the 1970s, organizations have witnessed and undergone the emergence of many models of management ranging from Total Quality Management, Re-Engineering, Manufacturing Cells to Self-Managed Teams and Net- worked Enterprises, among many others. In the implementation of all those models training was always a mandatory means to promote the required workers’ qualification to each one of those management rationales. The flexibility and repertoire of potentialities brought about by training enabled it to adjust itself to all management rationales, thus disclosing its open-ended condition to offer diverse varieties of service within a countless range of contexts to achieve ample diversity of long- and short-term development targets. That adjustment has demonstrated that training is a tool, rather like the interview which is an organized structure of face-to-face communication that can be applied to all sorts of investigation, learning, and persuasion. Analogously, training is a complex integration of learning activities organized to qualify people for their adaptation to and integration into the world, a structure developed in step with the evolution of work and society constantly differentiating its potentialities and achievements. Along its historical path training has faced various kinds of challenge that have only served to enrich it and enabled it to take each successive step. The challenge posed to it by the guilds were the organization of learning with few instruments and under the lim- itations imposed by social controls and community traditions. The challenges posed by industries were in the rigidity of the tasks needed to operate machines at regular speed, which divorced the creating mind from the making hands and thus imposed meaningless and repetitive tasks. The challenges posed by the structure of networks are the creation of tasks within a context of emerging properties at a synergic pace with others that also have to be frequently negotiated. In the face of all those challenges, training has proved itself capable of understanding its function and of offering appropriate services to sat- isfy most of the demands placed in its hands. It is not possible to forecast what work performance will be like in the coming decades but nobody doubts that training will be able to continue to answer its forthcoming challenges. As a mature and open-ended service supported by the alliance between academics and practitioners it is prepared to face any storm. Its success will be an outcome of its care for the double contribution it will continue to make, that is, the regulation of work performance and the individual’s emancipation which although in a kind of paradoxical relationship can be integrated and function complementarily.
####### References
Attewell, P. (1990). What is skill? Work and Occupations, 17(4), 422–448. Baxter, B. (1982). Alienation and Authenticity. London: Tavistock. Carroy, J., Ohayon, A., & Plas, R. (2006). Histoire de la psychologie en France. Paris: La Découverte. Douglas, P. (1921). American Apprenticeship in Industrial Education. New York: Columbia. Emmery, F. (1982). New perspectives in the world of work. Human Relations, 35(12), 1095–1122. Gregory, R. (1994). Seeing intelligence. In J. Khalfa (Ed.), What is Intelligence? (pp. 13–26). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1987). Mundos do trabalho. Brazil: Editora Paz e Terra. Kaufman, B. E. (2008). Managing the Human Factor. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Lattimore, O. (1962). Studies in Frontier History. London: Oxford University Press. Legge, K. (1995). Human Resource Management: Rhetorics and Realities. London, Macmillan. Muniz, M. A. G. (1975). Historia social del trabajo. Madrid: Jucar. Plutarch. (1952). The Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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Sleight, D. A. (1993). A developmental history of training in the United States and Europe. http:// msu/~sleightd/trainhst (accessed May 19, 2014). Smith, A. (1981). The Wealth of the Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Taylor, F. W. (1947). Taylor’s Testimony Before the Special House Committee: A Reprint of the Public Document, Hearings Before Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management Under Authority of House Resolution 90. New York: Harper & Row. Wallman, S. (1979). The Social Anthropology of Work. London: Academic Press.
Malvezzi, 2015
Course: Industrial Psychology
University: University of San Carlos
- Discover more from:Industrial PsychologyUniversity of San Carlos35 Documents
- More from:Industrial PsychologyUniversity of San Carlos35 Documents
