A recent UK survey found many graduates unprepared for employment while employers placed greater value on transferable, employability skills rather than on specific ones. Increased student entry into professional-oriented programs, and subsequent pressures on work placements, have educators looking to alternative ways of providing safe,…

Teachers play a vital role in the implementation of new programs. This article discusses how best to support teachers in the face of such change. Specifically, we describe the perspectives of teachers who participated in a pilot project of the responsiveness to intervention model. Through focus group data, the researchers explored the barriers…

Cultural awareness training that emphasizes communication delivers only a partial solution to the challenges that intercultural work teams face. Improving collaboration requires a strong foundation of performance management before a work team can determine how they will cooperate to perform to excellence. Against the backdrop of the authors'…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the quality culture and workforce performance in the Malaysian higher education sector. The study also aims to test and validate the psychometric properties of the quality culture and workforce performance instruments used in the study. Design/methodology/approach: A total…

Most executives have not heard of human performance technology (HPT), but a recent Google search showed 25 times more Google hits for "lean six sigma" than for "human performance technology." This article describes five factors that make HPT a hard sell: (1) HPT is not part of standard business jargon, (2) organizational executives associate…

How can organizations avoid the negative, sometimes chaotic, effects of multiple, poorly coordinated performance improvement interventions? How can we avoid punishing our external clients or staff with the side effects of solutions that might benefit our bottom line or internal efficiency at the expense of the value received or perceived by…

While training has been a proven and heavily relied on intervention to impart job-enabling information to performers, its ability to have a positive effect on job performance has been demonstrated to diminish over time. One intervention that has been adopted by performance technologists to provide ongoing support is an electronic performance…

Research points to links between school and school district leadership and student achievement. Local and national education reform has created rising expectations for student performance. Education leadership is both complex and high stakes. Key stakeholders in Georgia have developed a solution to improve factors in the work, workplace, and…

The focus of this qualitative research study using the Delphi method is to provide a framework for leaders to develop their own social networks. By exploring concerns in four areas, leaders may be able to better plan, implement, and manage social networking systems in organizations. The areas addressed are: (a) social networking using…

"Preparing for Work," developed by Equipped for the Future at the Center for Literacy Studies, University of Tennessee, is a skills-based course designed for implementation in organizations and agencies involved in preparing their clients and students for entry level work. Each of the instructional modules that comprise the…

If teaching is a complex act, it is additionally complex for first-year teachers', who enter with the same responsibilities as veteran teachers yet encounter specific difficulties as beginning teachers. This paper uses existing research on beginning English teachers major concerns to frame the exploration of concerns faced by four beginning…

The business of training and performance improvement has always been cyclical, with the fortunes of human resource development (HRD) and performance improvement professionals rising and falling with the economic fortunes of the workplace. The current economic downturn and nascent recovery represent an opportunity for HRD and performance…

This article discusses three perceived challenges in the field of human performance technology: a missing link from training to performance, limitations in gap analysis and cause analysis, and a lack of attention to business and organization performance. It then provides possible alternatives for each issue, such as instructional system…

Managers are often faulted for not managing performance; when performance issues surface, they first look to training as a possible solution. But without correctly identifying the cause of a performance problem, they can choose the wrong solution. The behavior engineering model (BEM) helps diagnose performance problems as well as engineer a…

This article is third in a series written to address questions regarding the need for more empirical research in the field of human performance technology (HPT) and the need to determine the future direction of HPT research. The call for more empirical research has been published in journals such as "Performance Improvement Quarterly" and…