Content area
Full text
The classroom has been the preferred location for most training programs in companies. But the reality is that employees learn most of their knowledge and skills in the work setting while actually doing their jobs. How to develop and implement effective on-the-job training programs, or structured on-the-job training (S-OJT), is a continuing challenge for many organizations and, in particular, for human resource staff members.
This paper has the following goals. First, it will discuss employee competence in the workplace, which is the context for understanding S-OJT. Next, the paper will define and describe what is meant by S-OJT, based on over two decades of research and development activities. Then, it will describe the KNPC experience in using S-OJT as the primary means to develop newly-hired engineers in their refineries, including an initial reporting of some outcomes of this initiative including the reduction in development time. Finally, the paper will discuss the practical lessons learned from the KNPC experience.
Employee competence
Ensuring that employees have the competence to meet current and future work expectations is an especially critical issue for managers today. As a result, more and more organizations have adopted training approaches such as S-OJT ([8] Jacobs, 2003).
S-OJT
S-OJT was originally introduced in the 1980s to help organizations respond to new demands for greater levels of quality and productivity. Many of the same fundamental issues exist in organizations today. Recent advances have greatly expanded how S-OJT is being used across a range of organizational settings and in combination with other training approaches. S-OJT is defined as the planned process of having experienced employees train novice employees on units of work in the actual work setting ([8] Jacobs, 2003). From this definition, S-OJT benefits from providing a greater degree of predictability in the training outcomes, and from being conducted mostly by experienced employees.
From a practical perspective, S-OJT offers some apparent advantages for managers because the training might be conducted when the employee need arises and without demanding any special resources from the organization, such as a classroom internet connection. Of particular relevance to S-OJT is the understanding that the match between the learning setting and the work setting for facilitates the transfer of training ([8] Jacobs, 2003). Since S-OJT is conducted in the work...