A telephone survey of nearly 2,000 small businesses in Britain showed employers had positive attitudes about training but 85% had not provided any for at least a year. Interviews with 200 cited market position, economic conditions, and lack of training availability as causes. They felt national training policies lacked focus, coherence, and…

Employers pay higher starting wages to workers requiring less training, but do not give lower starting wages to workers requiring more training. Employers appear to pay most of the cost of and reap most of the returns to training. (SK)

ISO 9000 certification has the advantages of a measurable framework for quality efforts, continuous improvement, and better customer service. Drawbacks for education and training providers include volume of paperwork, ongoing cost, risk of a growing bureaucracy, and the difficulty of making changes quickly. (SK)

Measures the impact of pre-job training programs on subsequent earnings of trainees, particularly engineers employed by high-tech firms in Taiwan. Concludes that public training programs have no impact on earnings but participation in private training programs does have a significantly positive effect on earnings, and compares results with…

Discusses the definition and roles of educational technologists. Highlights include an historical background; formal training programs; the marketplace for job opportunities in the field; job titles; and what attracted students to the field. (LRW)

Event-history analysis of data from 1979-91 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth panels (3,108 women, 3,003 men) showed that women received less initial company-provided training. Occupational gender segregation and family obligations afforded men better training opportunities than women. (SK)

Data from a national survey of 2945 employers showed that those most likely to have formal training programs were larger and had high-performance work systems, capital-intensive production, and better-educated workers. More workers were trained in companies with larger investments in physical capital or new forms of work organization. (SK)

Case studies of transportation needs of individuals with severe disabilities illustrate various methods of training them in transportation use and locating options. (SK)

Line managers in empowering (n=58) and nonempowering (n=37) British companies were compared. Although "empowered" managers felt better equipped to supervise, they appeared undertrained and unmotivated to develop staff. "Empowerment" was often indistinguishable from work intensification. (SK)

Seven case studies of Dutch organizations were used to analyze the relationship between organizational characteristics and types of on-the-job training (OJT) using contingency theory. When the type of structured OJT corresponded to the type of organization, the probability of effectiveness was greater. (SK)

Includes three brief essays that offer practical pointers for managers who handle training for their organizations. Highlights include a training function checklist for executives; questions executives should ask about training; and the cost of unstructured, informal on-the-job training. (LRW)

Western Australia Department of Training is supporting a Literacy and Numeracy Pilot in which providers identify the literacy and numeracy skills their projects address, how skill needs are assessed, and what strategies are used to deliver instruction. Three industries are targeted for the pilot, which attempts to make literacy and numeracy…

The principal shortage means that many educators, including assistant principals and resource teachers, are moving into the job with little training. Mentor and apprenticeship relationships can aid leadership development. Exemplary leaders' highest calling is to build leadership in others--exemplified in Santa Cruz's Growing Our Own" program.…

Five case studies compared output-related funding (ORF) in Britain's Training for Work program with input-based funding used by the European Social Fund. The nature of incentives in ORF led to creaming and encouraged curtailed training for immediate employment. These perverse incentives make cost-effectiveness data misleading. (SK)

Interviews with 200 training professionals in Australia suggested that the way competence and standards are constituted in competency-based education is not entirely congruent with employer needs. They could be reconsidered in order to represent the nature of vocational knowledge and characteristics of work. (SK)