TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT

Linda Hamid has just been appointed as Human Resource Director in Feline Central, a business specializing in cat grooming, apparels, training and accommodation. The business is growing fast with 15 stores nationwide and 180 employees which includes cat groomers, trainers, sales and administrative personnel.

One of the first thing that Linda notices is the lack of formal and planned training programs in the company. Most of the trainings that have been conducted were done piecemeal and on contingency basis. There are no centralized trainings, and each store seems to have its own way of doing things. Even staff at the head office in Kelana Jaya have had no formal trainings to keep everyone up to date. As a result, Linda noticed sharp decline in profits in some of the stores and an increase in customers' dissatisfaction from the feedbacks received on their website.

Linda calls for an urgent meeting with her team of eight people in HR and requests that the department conduct a thorough training needs analysis in Feline Central. Linda as the HR Director will be taking care of the organizational analysis, together with her manager, Kamal. She divided the rest into two teams to handle the task analysis and person analysis.

The team assigned to do task analysis was asked to focus on cat grooming since that is the core of Feline Central's business while the second team was assigned to do person analysis to identify the performance gaps in the company.

QUESTIONS

1 . You are the head of the team doing task analysis. Elaborate how you would analyze the job of a cat groomer so that the outcome of the analysis could be used to plan a more effective training programs for the employees concerned. (12 Marks)

2. The second team is tasked to do the person analysis in order to identify the factors that influence employee's performance and learning at the company. Explain how the team should carry out this process. Support your answer with relevant examples so that the HR department can determine if performance problems can be solved by training and subsequently design an appropriate program. (12 Marks)