INTRODUCTION TO SELECTION, TRAINING, AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONNEL

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INTRODUCTION

Selection, training, and development are the primary tools used to promote human performance in industrial engineering settings. In this chapter, we will review important research issues in these areas. We have elected to emphasize training over the equally important topics of selection and development, primarily because training can often have substantial impact in existing application areas. In many industrial engineering situations, staff members are already in place, and even if personnel selection is an option, it is performed by other agencies, such as the human resources department. Second, ‘‘development’’ activities often consist of training—either the construction of new training programs or the use of existing ones, or both. Consequently, in our view, training (plus judicious use of other, ancillary, performance-improvement technologies) constitutes a serious poten- tial impact area for industrial engineering situations.

Further, a major concern in the domain of selection research is the development of technologies designed to address the validity and reliability of instruments used to select personnel. (‘‘Validity’’ deals with the question of determining the extent to which an assessment technique actually measures what it purports to measure, such as intelligence, clerical skill, and mathematical aptitude. ‘‘Relia- bility’’ addresses the extent to which such an instrument measures whatever it purports to measure consistently, that is, without major score differences upon repeated applications of the instrument to the same people.) Such topics as these, while very important, are beyond the scope of this chapter.

For the same reason, we have chosen not to deal with other widely researched topics in this domain, such as recruitment of personnel, employee retention, personnel turnover, metaanalysis (sta- tistical technologies for collapsing data from multiple research programs in order to reach general- izable conclusions), and validity generalization (techniques designed to apply known measurement validities obtained in one situation to another). Readers interested in these topics may consult the many current textbooks available in these areas or an overall review article (Guion 1991). An au- thoritative reference for those involved in the methods used in selection and classification of personnel is the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA et al. 1999).

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