| Title | Human Capital: Selected Agencies' Experiences and Lessons Learned in Designing Training and Development Programs |
| ShortDescription | The U.S. General Accounting Office identified important lessons learned from five federal agencies' experiences in designing employee training and development programs that could be applied to other agencies facing similar challenges. The knowledge gained relates to the three areas of assessing agency skill requirements and identifying training needs, developing strategies and solutions for training needs, and determining methods for evaluating training programs. |
| LongDescription | To effectively address the nation's most urgent priorities and take advantage of emerging opportunities, federal agencies need to continue to build their fundamental capabilities to carry our their work in an environment that is increasingly complex and rapidly changing. To build their capacity, agencies should invest resources wisely to ensure that their employees have the information, skills, and competencies they need to succeed. These investments must include training and development efforts to continuously enhance the skills and competencies of the federal workforce and improve the quality of agencies' results. This report provides information on selected federal agencies' experiences and lessons learned in key aspects of designing training and development programs for their employees. Specifically, the report focuses on the agencies' acquired knowledge and experiences related to assessing current and future agency skill and competency requirements, identifying related training and development needs, providing strategies and solutions for employee training and development programs, and determining methods to evaluate the effectiveness of training and development programs. An understanding of the positive and negative experiences resulting from this process could be applied to future related projects. The experiences and lessons learned from the five agencies reviewed may well provide valuable ideas and useful approaches that could be adopted by other federal agencies as they attempt to address ongoing training and development challenges, particularly those related to elements within the training process that relate to design and development. The five federal agencies involved were the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the Department of Defense, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the Department of the Interior (Interior), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Documents on the agencies' training and development efforts were reviewed and officials from the agencies' human capital and training organizations, as well as assorted program offices, were interviewed. The five agencies were selected for various reasons including the diversity of employee occupations within the agency, and reported innovative approaches for training and developing their employees. The report attempts to highlight some of the experiences and lessons that the agencies found helped them move forward in improving their training and development programs. Federal agencies' training and development strategies and how they are designed to operate in conjunction with other strategies to improve individual and organizational performance, continue to change and evolve. The review was conducted from August 2002 through November 2003 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. |
| SourceAuthor | Government Accountability Office (GAO). |
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| Organization | Government Accountability Office (GAO) |
| ContactAddress | Washington, DC |
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| Website |
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04291.pdf
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| Other | Target audience: those who have responsibility for training programs |
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