Abstract:

The higher education landscape in South Africa can be described as being one of hyper-competitiveness, characterized by significant turnover and an increasing need for sector-specific skills. Universities face enormous challenges including competitors for sector-specific skills, demands for higher quality performance and scarcity of skills. There is an increasing need to focus on the creation of enabling staff training and development interventions in order to inculcate and enhance skill capabilities. To give effect to this, training and development strategies must be developed to meet the organisation’s needs. Failure to meet the above requirement will result in ineffective service delivery, increased risk through litigation and possibly low levels of customer satisfaction. Another negative result will be an inability to keep abreast with new trends and practices, resulting in poor institutional strategies, practices and processes, resulting in the loss of top performing staff in the institution and the non-completion of projects. Many organisations struggle with under-resourced departments due to the structural limitations that are underpinned by a number of factors including high staffing costs, a scarcity of adequately qualified and experienced staff and increased workload on the existing workforce. A quantitative study was conducted to gauge the impact of a cohesive training and development strategy that was introduced in 2009 for staff at the Walter Sisulu University. The research study is motivated by an analysis of the correlation between effective training and development practices and the impact of this on enhancing institutional capability.

Keywords:

Skills development, strategy, univerity.