HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT A Contemporary Approach

Human Resource Development sits at the point where an organisation’s ambitions meet the capacities of the people who must deliver them. This coursebook treats that meeting point as a practical discipline rather than an abstraction, and works through it in fifteen lessons. It opens with the meaning, importance and evolution of HRD, and the assessment–planning–review cycle at its core. From there it moves through cognition and the signs and symbols by which people learn safely at work; literacy, numeracy and digital skill; the recognition of prior learning; emotional intelligence; and experiential learning. Later lessons take up organisational, employee and career development, e-learning, team work and communities of practice, self-directed learning, entrepreneurship education, continuous professional development, the ‘train the trainer’ initiative, an artificial-intelligence perspective, and the strategic initiatives that hold the whole together. Every lesson is built for teaching: stated aims and objectives, an introduction, worked explanation, a conclusion, a case study drawn from practice, discussion questions, ten multiple-choice questions with an answer key, and references for further reading. Case material from Mauritius and elsewhere grounds the theory in real institutions. The book is written for undergraduate and postgraduate students of human resource management, for practitioners responsible for training and development, and for the managers who must decide what their people need to learn next.