Scenario

For this project, you are a human resource consultant working for HRUCanTrust Consulting. You have been with the firm a little over a year but have been working in HR for five years. Your role as a consultant gives you the opportunity to work with a variety of clients and projects, from recruiting the chief executive officer (CEO) of a firm to crafting a performance management process for a large automotive manufacturer. Your newest client, Marthas Marketing, is asking you to review their existing training and learning plan for their 75-employee firm. After you review their plan, they want you to recommend any changes you would make for the upcoming year. After meeting with the CEO of Marthas Marketing as well as the management staff, you have the following notes and information to help you craft your proposal:

• All 75 employees participated in some job skills training in the previous year. All employees had mandatory training for compliance, and 10 employees went to an outside training for leadership. Some sales training was conducted, but it was sporadic, and only about 20% of the employees were able to complete it fully.
• On the basis of employee insight survey data, only 40% of the employees thought the training was worth their time and relevant to the job. Eighty-nine percent of employees rated training as important to their organizational happiness and overall retention.
• Last year, the company spent $90,000 on training (about $1,200 per person).
• Overall, company performance has decreased 5% in the past year. Seventy-eight percent of the employees were rated at target or below target during the last performance review cycle.
• All training at the organization takes place on site and is conducted from the same vendor, Training Trailblazers.
• Managers collectively agree that the training needs to transfer back to the job and needs to be measured for effectiveness.

Directions

For this project, you will create a PowerPoint presentation for senior management. Elaborate in the speaker notes section for each slide. This presentation will identify your results from assessing the effectiveness of the organizations current learning and development plan. It will also provide a new learning and development plan that strengthens and fills gaps from the previous plan.

Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:

Plan Effectiveness

In this part of the presentation, you will provide an overview of what kinds of plans are effective and of considerations for the company.

1. Identify appropriate stakeholders for participation in the training. Include the following in your response:
   1. Identify appropriate stakeholders with whom to communicate the plan and who will receive the training.
   2. How does an effective learning and development plan identify performance as a key factor to assess using data considerations?
   3. Are there considerations to avoid making learning and development ineffective?
2. Discuss pros and cons of an organization training employees internally and externally. Consider the following in your response:
   1. How does the approximate cost of internal training compare with the approximate cost of external training?
   2. How does the time commitment required compare for internal versus external training?
   3. Does the current plan have a good return on investment?
3. Determine if internal or external training would work best for the organization, justifying your response. Consider the following in your response:
   1. On the basis of the pros and cons and what you know about the organizations needs, what options would work well? Provide your justification in the speaker notes.