Human Resources Development

Fredric Harbison (1973,pg 3) defined human resources as the energies, skills and knowledge of people which are, or which potentially can or should be applied to the production of goods and services. Tobias (1969) defined manpower as people, humanity, and society with all its aspirations, needs and capacities.
From an enterprise, organization, or institutional point of view, human resource development (HRD) could be described as the integrated use of personnel training and development, organization development and career development to improve individual group, and enterprises organizational Institutional effectiveness to fulfill the vision of the institution. The basic purpose of HRD in the institution will be to develop a good fit between the institution, its job practices, activities and environment. It focuses on an organized effort to improve the current and future performance of the personnel in the institutional setting. The HRD program is expected to be a vehicle for developing personnel competencies, skills, and understandings to enable the organization to achieve its mission and goals. This can be achieved through three major ways:
• HRD is concerned with clearing strategies that continuously improve the performance of the organization of human resources both individually and in groups.
• HRD is concerned with the needs of people to be productive contributors to the organizations’ vision and society’s mandates.
• HRD involves learning about affective approaches to the following areas and the return on investment to the organization from such activities:
i) Strategic human resource planning
ii) Alternative methods for improving performance (training, education, career and organization development).
iii) Technology transfer of leaving
iv) Performance evaluation (Basket Carnes, Groff, and Sample, 1994).
From the above it implies that from an economy-wide point of view human resources development is the process of increasing the knowledge, the skills, and the capacities of all the people in a society. In economic terms, it could be described as the accumulation of human capital and its effective investment in the development of an economy. In political terms, human resources development prepares people for adult participation in political process, particularly as citizens in a democracy. From the social and cultural points of view, the development of human resources helps people to lead fitter and richer lives, less bound by tradition (de Silva 1997 ). In short, the processes of human resources development could be described as unlocking the door to modernization. According to De Silva (1997), the importance of HRD is obvious when one considers that in any economic activity it is the human element that commands, directs, organizes, controls, maximizes the factors of production. This implies that the quality of people appropriate to the particular level and complexities of the activity determines how well or poorly, these tasks are accomplished. The implication is that a poorly accomplished task implies poor and weak economic performance (low or negative growth rate) and a well-accomplished task implies strong economic performance (high growth rate).