Sweet Success: Strategic Training and Development

In today's business, a company's investment in training and development activities goes beyond the belief that it is simply a good thing to do. Training and development activities are becoming more strategic. That is, they are increasingly used to develop intellectual capital and to address business needs related to learning, behavior change, and performance improvement. Training and development activities are used to contribute to business strategy and help companies reach their goals. The strategic training and development process includes linking a company's business strategy to strategic training and development initiatives and actions, and identifying metrics or standards that could be used to determine whether training and development activities actually contribute to business goals and objectives related to the business strategy. This case shows how Just Born, maker of Peeps, Mike & Ike, Hot Tamales, and other candies, engages in strategic training and development to support its business strategy. In this exercise, please read the mini-case and answer the questions that follow. Just Born has three business objectives: improve sales, profits, and leadership. Just Born wants to obtain aggressive growth and above-average profitability through superior leadership. It has implemented several business strategies to reach these objectives, including growing the brands, expanding into international markets, diversifying, reducing supply chain costs, establishing effective procurement, and developing a market-driven scorecard. The Just Born People Development System is designed to ensure that learning and development align with the business strategy and drive business results. Each year, associates at Just Born create learning plans based on performance evaluations and development plans. The associate and supervisor agree upon four personal objectives that will help achieve departmental objectives and two competencies that need improvement. Using the corporate competency dictionary, the associate and manager develop a learning plan. The learning plans are collected and used to develop a corporate learning matrix, which is used to build the corporate learning plan. At the end of the year, merit pay increases are based on the achievement of performance objectives, as well as the learning plan. Just Born has more than fifty internal trainers who offer customized training to meet the learning needs of associates at all levels of the company. Just Born also offers a leadership program for managers. In this program managers learn fundamental leadership skills in addition to learning the Wow...Now Improvement Process. This process teaches a systematic way to make process improvements and deliver business results. Managers work in teams on a business problem involving data collection and analysis of decision-making and processes. At the end of the training, the managers present to the executive team and trainers what they learned, the tools they used, and the business results of their projects. At Just Born, the impact of learning the business is measured by business results including growth and above average profitability. Also, use of the improvement process by managers in the leadership program has resulted in more than two million dollars in cost savings.

1) Just Born managers encourage employees to complete action plans as a way to

A) Evaluate training programs

B) Identify training needs

C) Encourage transfer of training

D) Create a learning environment

E) Conduct a cost–benefit analysis

2) _____ refers to learning that is learner initiated.

A) Knowledge management

B) Continuous learning

C) Formal learning

D) Informal learning

E) Explicit knowledge

3) Just Born found that the improvement process emphasized in the management leadership program saved the company millions of dollars. This is an example of a(n)

A) Cognitive outcome

B) Skills-based outcome

C) Reaction outcome

D) Affective outcome

E) Results outcome

4) Which of the following training methods is used in the management leadership program?

A) Action learning

B) Adventure learning

C) E-learning

D) Behavior modeling    

E) Blended learning

5) What term refers to employee characteristics that provide employees with the desire, energy, and focus necessary to learn from training?

A) Strategies for training

B) Action plan for training

C) Transfer of training

D) Readiness for training

E) Motivation to learn