There is a common belief that the educational systems should equip students with the knowledge and abilities needed to adapt to a constantly changing world. Skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, innovation, digital literacy and flexibility top the list. The optimal way to develop those skills, including whether teaching and learning strategies are ideal for assisting or enabling the development of complex skills, is negotiable.

Technological advancement and economic and social changes are creating pressure on the governmental and non-governmental organisations to redevelop their human resources and to accomplish complex technological functions.

Three features are dominating today’s world:

The developing countries are becoming a manufacturing centre, while the developed countries are becoming service-based.

Knowledge products are taking the place of other commodities.

There has been a substitution of knowledge and information workers for manual production within the goods sector.

This predominance of human resources over non-human resources changes the socio-technical system in organisations. A developed base of human resources is required to reinvent and re-engineer corporations. Most importantly, sustainable economic development necessitates a developed human resources base.

According to the World Bank, faster economic growth requires three fundamental factors: human capital, physical capital and natural capital. Interestingly, human capital has a significant share (64 per cent), and it is a fact that the economic growth and development are possible to the extent to which the human capital can transform non-human capital into commodities. Thus, human resources must be properly managed and effectively developed to gain a competitive edge.

Let’s first define what the human resource development (HRD) is because it has ambiguous connotations apart from its wide use. It may refer to a rise in human capabilities, rights and entitlements from a corporate and economic standpoint, or it may refer to a human development tool that permits social and personal development towards economic progress and democratic self-development.

The human resource development is described as a “process of developing the knowledge, skills and capabilities of all individuals” in a community. In economic terms, it may be defined as “the accumulation of human talents and their successful investment” in the economic growth.

It advises pursuing new research routes that would raise knowledge of inter-and intra-organisational relationships, while taking into account the macroeconomic and macro-social variables.

In political terms, the human resource development prepares people for “adult participation” in the political process, particularly as citizens in a democratic process. From the social and cultural point of view, the human resource development helps people lead fuller and richer lives.

From the organisation or corporation perspective, HRD has different motives, boundaries and environmental and institutional factors. It does not feature much in the government organisations. However, private organisations are on the right path and keeping pace with the needs of the time. The government has established training institutions and provides training to its officials under the civil service reforms. Because of legacy operating procedures, unimaginative bureaucracy and pedagogies are inefficiently transformed without a strategic transition. There is no evidence that the government does better, or even, as well as, than the private sector in training people for the private sector jobs. Thus, in some cases, the marginal benefit of training is negligible or even harmful.

The private sector organisations are relatively better because of their strategic transition, division of bureaucracy and conducive environment. However, they also require reshaping to achieve the HRD goals.

This situation, at both national and organisational levels, is not encouraging. Nevertheless, the fundamental question is why this situation arises and persists?

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) country report, the following can explain low HRD outcomes at the national level: the lack of availability of schooling facilities, 10 per cent of GNP is required to fulfil education and basic health requirements, whereas, at present, the country is spending around three per cent of its GNP on these sectors. Even the allotted money is not utilised correctly and misappropriation and mismanagement are prevalent. The cross-country comparisons indicate that the social sector spending remained low, compared with the infrastructure spending.

At the organisational level, training is seldom planned and systematic; no need for analysis, no impact assessment, and no follow-ups are conducted. Training lacks a strategic focus.

HRD is still in its infancy in organisations. The basic concepts of the development-oriented system, such as a job analysis, objective and result-based performance appraisal and performance-based rewards, do not exist or are improperly implemented. The absence of the development-oriented management and organisational system created the problem of relevancy and transferability of learning to the workplace.

One of the overriding features is the lack of indigenous research-based training material. All the conceptual frameworks, management models and role models for understanding the leadership dynamics in formal organisations are drawn from organisations in Western or North American countries. And above all, training institutions, especially those run by the government, the lack of competent and motivated trainers.

The situation at the national and organisational levels is not hopeful but still manageable. Indigenous, cohesive and well-planned policies can fill this void. Since the problem has macro and micro-foundations, necessary steps are required at both levels.

However, the policies at both levels should not be mutually exclusive; instead, they have complementary effects and bi-directional factual causation. The following action plan is recommended as a general guideline. Leadership is lacking in the HRD area. Therefore, committed and effective leadership is a compulsory requirement to accomplish goals.

A clear-headed, clear-visioned and integrated leadership should equip itself to face the following challenges:

*    Leading organisations in an environment of dwindling resources and increased demand for quality services, sustainable development and retention of skills for the organisational community;

*    Cultivating a performance management culture with an emphasis on results;

*    Upholding good governance, despite a hostile and ever-changing environment; and

*    Keeping pace with the advances in information technology and workforce renewal.

The leadership can take the following steps:

*    Improvement in the accountability and incentive mechanism of public service delivery should be made one of the primary objectives of the comprehensive devotion plan.

*    The national policy on HRD should be reformulated to address the ground realities and to support strategic transition in the working environment.

*    A greater attention should be given to qualitative change because in the modern competitive environment, ‘quality’ is the catchword. At the organisational level, the following steps could be taken:

*    Re-education should be the policy word because experience has shown that reinvention and re-engineering require substantial re-education rather than simply acquiring and strengthening skills. This is especially so for training, aimed at improving accountability, efficiency and responsiveness in the government;

*    The evaluation and assessment of training are helped by having clear objectives. However, setting goals is best seen as an interactive process in which the experience of exercise leads to modified plans and changed priorities. Familiar goals include institutional development, organisational development and capacity-building;

*    Training should be viewed as an investment in human capital with strong positive externalities. The organisations should prefer tailor-made programmes to meet their own development needs instead of relying on general programmes offered by training institutions;

*    Economic and behavioural theories significantly improve national understanding of HRD issues. Therefore, HRD policies should include political, social, cultural and economic aspects;

The traditional learning models should be replaced with flexible and more relevant models. Learning as a way of being (LWB) by Peter B Vailll is a significant improvement on earlier models.

The LWB models have seven pillars: Self-directed learning, creative learning, expressive learning, feeling learning, online learning, continual learning, and reflexive learning. The LWB probably encompasses a somewhat different set of attitudes and behaviour for each person, considering the difference in experience, beliefs and values (including cultural norms and taboos), kinds and levels of intelligence and learning style; and

* Learning activities should support openness. This scenario assumes the externalisation of all or parts of the training courses. In particular, the division between universities responsible for providing academic education, and training centres, which are more oriented towards vocational training, should be minimised.

The second form of openness is collaborative research. This openness could be seen more as a transversal approach than a beach approach. Professionals in civil services and the private sector have to work together to share the experiences of different cultures and the same cultures.

Thus, HRD is a multidimensional issue requiring a multidisciplinary approach to achieve goals and set objectives. Policymakers at all levels should conduct research, share experiences and enhance collaboration. The topology proposed in this piece takes a broader perspective of strategic human resource management.

It defines some boundaries of the concepts and presents a set of prerequisites that needs further holistic and reductionistic exploration.

It suggests the exploitation of new avenues of research that would create greater awareness about inter-organisation and intra-organization interactions while considering the macroeconomic and macro-social conditions.

Several cutting-edge pedagogical strategies sound promising for a developing nation like Pakistan. The pedagogies — formative analytics, teach-back, place-based learning, learning with robots and drones and citizen inquiry — are either associated with particular technical advancements, or they have arisen as a result of a sophisticated grasp of the science of learning.

(The writer is the CEO of Iqra University Extension)