Abstract:

Work organisations may largely take two paths in providing their employees with the required competences for doing business. The first path would be seeking and buying up human resources with the required competences, and the second path would be developing the existing human resources of the organisation and teaching the personnel the competences required for the job. The necessity to develop the competences of the human resources within an organisation is made central by three important considerations. Primarily, it is the demographic situation which signals future shortage of young employees with contemporary education and, consequently, inevitable ageing of the labour and necessity to remain economically active in an increasingly older age, secondly, seeking personnel resources outside the organisation and hiring them is a short-term solution, and, thirdly, academic education does not guarantee the competences necessary for the job. To perform the official duties successfully and demonstrate high-level performance, training within the organisation is a must. One of the possible training approaches is based on the competences of the employees. Specifically, the competences and their level distinguish the employees with high results of performance from those with average ones. Training and development activities provide a significant contribution in assuring that the targets of the organisation are successfully achieved and that the input of the organisation provides a contribution to all the parties involved. The aim of the research is to study the use of the model of competences in the planning of employee training and development, develop recommendations for the management of the retail sale organisation for the establishment of a competence-based training approach in the organisation. The research questions were the following: How is training currently organised in the retail sale organisation? How do the employees of the organisation rate the offered development opportunities and what are their preferences? What personnel management processes and process supplements are necessary for the organisation to introduce a competence-based personnel training approach? What are the crucial competences for high performance of the most represented job clusters in the organisation and the management? The results of the research showed that no specific plan or strategy is followed in the organisation of the training within the retail sale organisation, the training within the organisation is not based on performance and development interviews, and the company does not have a structured approach to training events. The respondents believe that competence models should be included in the performance and development interviews. The following competences have been defined as crucial for the managers: influence, developing others, persistence and use of authority, orientation of achievements, team leadership, self-confidence, initiative, analytic thinking, problem analysis. The authors believe that the obtained results can be used for the development of the approach to training within the organisation, i.e., making the training more focused and meaningful, thus improving the professionalism of the employees of the organisation, increasing the profit of the organisation, and eliminating waste of the resources.

Keywords:

Competence, personnel training, development.