The purpose of the study was to investigate the application of the chunking process to the design and delivery of workforce training. Students in a 1-hour course (N = 110) were measured on learner reaction, learning score achievement, and knowledge retention to see whether or not chunking training in a 1-hour session into three 20-minute sessions to match adult attention span resulted in a statistically significant difference from training for 1-hour without chunking. The study utilized a repeated measures design, in which the same individuals in both the control group and experimental group took a reaction survey instrument, a posttest after the training, and again 30 days later. Independent samples t tests were used to compare the mean performance scores of the treatment group versus the control group for both sessions. Cohen's d was also computed to determine effect size. All hypotheses found a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group.

Employee engagement and training & development, as a human resources management practice, has been extensively studied across the world. These studies tested employee engagement and training & developments’ effect on various measures of performance. The bulk of these studies were conducted in North America over the past three decades with more studies emanating from other parts of the world for the better part of the past decade. Studies largely found a positive correlation between these two variables and the specific measure of performance being tracked. This research seeks to determine whether the effect on perceived performance would be similar when testing employee engagement and training & development within the South African context. A quantitative approach was adopted and proved that both training & development and employee engagement has a positive result on perceived performance. The relationship between training & development and employee engagement was ambivalent. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / zkgibs2015 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / Unrestricted

Bibliography: pages 107-120. / This thesis explores the decline and transmutation of the apprenticeship system in South Africa, specifically as it occurred in the metal and engineering industry. It proceeds to analyse the most basic and influential imperatives which have driven this process. On the side of capital, these imperatives were the inexorable motive for a profit driven industrial organisation and on the side of organised labour, the imperatives to protect skills, jobs and wages. The existence of the one set of imperatives presupposed the need to redefine the existence of the other set. These contradictory imperatives have shaped the trajectory of the apprenticeship system in South Africa. They were contradictory because the one was an impediment on the untrammelled extension of the other. However, as the imperative of profit maximisation gradually became the predominant consideration in the relationship, it began to exert greater pressure on the character of the apprenticeship system. Within the apprenticeship training system, the imperative of profit maximization prioritised price calculation as the dominant consideration by which decisions and trajectories were chartered. Since the state mediated the relationship between the various economic interests in society, its interventions merely curtailed a more rapid consolidation of the effects of a profit driven industrial organisational imperative, within the apprenticeship training system. The triumph of the profit maximization imperative, systematically eroded the system of apprenticeship training in the metal and engineering industry of South Africa. An institutional inertia within the South African state resulted in the manifestation of erosive effects within institutions of the state empowered with governing and managing human resources development. This institutional inertia within the state was an accompaniment to the broader erosion of the apprenticeship training system at the workplace.

Succession planning is the creation of a pool of high potential employees that receive specific training and developmental opportunities with the intention of promotion. There is a definite need to deepen our understanding of what implications there are from a psychological point of view for employees when a major process like succession planning is implemented. Employee engagement is the experienced commitment, which leads to discretionary effort. The purpose of this research is to explore an underlying factor structure for engagement drivers and understand how a major organizational initiative, succession planning, impacts employee engagement. This research was conducted at a petroleum organization in the Southwest United States (N = 2023) and compares engagement based on group membership in a succession planning process (Informed-High Status, Uninformed-High Status, and Uninformed-Low Status). The underlying factor structure of drivers was found to have one factor of engagement. There was a significant difference in the engagement levels based on membership within the succession plan (high status versus low status). However, communicating to an employee their involvement in the succession plan did not differentiate between engagement levels.

Staff training packages combining instructions, modeling, practice, and feedback have been shown to be effective in demonstrating skills to work in early intensive behavioral intervention, but maintenance and generalization of the skills trained are often not addressed. Establishing a community of practice, in which staff members continue to learn and develop new skill sets from one another through shared experiences and information, may lead to the endurance and maintenance of desired staff behavior over time. The purpose of the current study is to evaluate the effects of a behaviorally designed community of practice on staff use of socially embedded consequences. The effects of the training procedure were evaluated using a concurrent multiple baseline design across two sites (7 staff members). The results suggest that the behaviorally planned community of practice was effective in reinforcing and maintaining staff use of socially embedded consequences for at least 5 to 9 weeks. Additionally, the number of learning opportunities provided by the staff and social engagement between staff and child increased.

Significant research efforts have addressed the need for pursuing graduate teacher education to improve in-service teachers’ teaching practices. On contrary, empirical knowledge about the impacts of structural and process features of graduate teacher education on in-service teachers’ teaching practices is underdeveloped. This proposed study was designed to contribute to an empirically driven knowledge about the degree to which graduate teacher education programs support in-service teachers’ classroom needs and guide them diligently to deal with professional challenges. Mixed methodology approach including survey questionnaire (quantitative) and interview (qualitative) was used, and 34 in-service from 15 different teacher education programs of five different Upper Midwest states responded to the survey questionnaire. However, only two teachers participated in the interview process. Quantitative data from survey questionnaire revealed that most teacher participants perceived that graduate teacher education program had positive impact on their teaching practices.

A well-run business combines motivated, trained employees with the right work environment to produce the greatest results at the least cost. When the results (from a product or service) do not exceed costs by a sufficient margin, at least one part of the system is not operating efficiently. This problem is caused by a production deficiency, which occurs when actual performance does not match the desired performance (Herem, 1979). In order to determine the root of this problem, two areas must be examined. These areas are (a) the nature of the work environment and its organizational structure, which may prevent performance in spite of employee effort, and (b) the employees themselves who may lack either the motivation or the skills to perform the job. Intervention can be designed for either or both of these areas to ameliorate the production deficiency. After implementation, the results of such interventions must be evaluated for their effectiveness. This paper will review the processes of deficiency assessment, intervention, and program evaluation as they might be found in a business or service setting.

No description available.

A research report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Mathematical Statistics, School of Statistics and Actuarial Science to the Faculty of Science University of Witwatersrand, 2019 / In this work, an investigation into the problem of optimising the operations of a call center is done. The call arrival process is explored and found to be a non-homogeneous Poisson process with arrival rate that is a piece-wise constant function. The call service times are found to possibly be lognormally distributed. The use of well-known queuing models such as the Erlang A, B and C in modeling a call center’s operations with the ultimate goal of determining optimal number of agents needed to obtain an agreed upon targeted service level (SL) threshold is discussed. The target SL involves answering between 85% - 90% of all incoming calls within 15 /30 seconds as per industry norms. / TL (2020)

No description available.