CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1     Background of the Study

The history of training in business organizations is as long as the entire history of business organizations (Miller, 1996:3). This is because the knowledge base or skills of the normal employees in the labour market is not sufficient for the specialized tasks within the organizations. However, the academic study of various forms of training did not start until about a century ago, when researchers started a branch of research under the name of “vocational training” (Salas and Cannon Bowers, 2001). The beginning of the twentieth century and especially after World War II saw the widespread of training programs among organizations, involving more and more employees and also expanding in content (Luo,

2000). In the 1910s, only a few large companies such as Westinghouse, General Electric, and International Harvester had factory schools that focused on training technical skills for entrylevel workers. By the end of 1990, forty percent of the Fortune 500 firms in America had a corporate university or learning center (Meister, 1997).

Training in Nigeria could be traced back to 1960 when it was discovered that most of the top government and business positions were occupied by expatriates (Olalere and Adesoji, 2013). The departure of the whites after independence gave rise to a big vacuum of capable indigenous human capital. This prompted the Federal Government of Nigeria to set up a

Manpower Board in 1962 following the Ashby Commissions Recommendations (Olalere and Adesoji, 2013:83). Consequently, the Federal Government of Nigeria established complimentary institutions like the Centre for Management Development (CMD),

Administrative Staff College of Nigeria, Industrial Training Fund (ITF), and Federal Training Centre to train and retrain employees as well as give orientation to fresh graduates of formal academic institutions (Olalere and Adesoji, 2013).

Today, we are witnessing an overwhelming number of research studies from both descriptive and prescriptive traditions, focusing on several characteristics of training programs as well as their costs and benefits for business organizations (Becker and Gerhart, 1996). At the same time, organizations have come to better understand the significance of training for their survival in knowledge-intensive and volatile markets of this era, and thus have increasingly acknowledged the profitability of developing their human resources through various forms of training (Berge, 2001; Salas and Cannon-Bowers, 2001). Human resource capital of any organization plays an important role, thus training and retraining helps in fortifying employees (Khan, Khan and Khan, 2011).

Despite the obvious significance of training, the enormous expansion in the content of training programs over time has largely been taken for