Personal Reflective Journal

Personal Reflective Journal#1

Q1: Which do you believe contributes most to help an organization gain a competitive advantage?

Generally, different company, region and culture might have some hetero-management styles because the requirements and resources aren’t similar. However, all HRM practice areas including staffing, training & development, compensation & benefits, health & safety, and employee relations are quite necessary for all kind of organization however the only way to make a company gain a competitive advantage is the company has to make sure that they are better continuously. So, the employees must be trained and able to response the changing of industry timely.

The research said that “up to 40% of externally hired executives in the private sector fail within the first 18 months and many others who are recruited from outside the company leave within five years”. When the company recruits some new staffs externally that mean the firm already paid time and money because to hire new employees the HR department will spend their working hour to do the recruitment and additional budget will be needed. Additionally, new staff will require some times to feel familiar with organization not only formal structure which can be taught and explained easily but also have informal structure including company culture, co-worker, environment, unwritten rule, process and network. So, to improve employee’s capability internally is much better good idea.

To recruit high performance staff from outside might raises the company performance rapidly but just in a short term thus as the research said that they will leave in few year. So, to gain the competitive advantage permanently T&D will be the important tool because it will be the fundamental for the firm in the future to understand how to build up the suitable person for a specific position. Nowadays, there is a popular word “learning organization” which is the firm that recognizes the critical importance of continuous performance-related T&D and take appropriate action. In learning organization the employee will gain highly opportunity to fulfil their capability and be rewarded for learning and are provided enriched jobs, promotions, and compensation. Moreover, the learning company will be more attractive and be interested by people so it might have better chance to get better-qualified employees who focus on self-improvement and tend to be work-harder than other one who only focus on compensation and benefits. Training and development are similar in concept but different in practice where training is activities designed to provide learners with the knowledge and skill needed for the present jobs. But, development is learning that goes beyond today’s job and has more long-term focus. Then we can see that training is always needed for ensuring that staff will understand the job’s process correctly. And to gain competitive advantage the company also has to set up the development program correctly to make sure that the organization will be able to response the changing in correct direction.