Starbucks On The Job Training

On the Job Training is a popular learning interventions that presupposes employees acquiring and/or developing work-related skills while at the workplace. The main goal of this intervention is to increase productivity of an employee by allowing him or her to become more skillful and, consequently, more useful for the company (Barron, Berger, & Black, 1997). Types of On the Job Training can be very different, depending on the work setting and specific goals of any particular On the Job Training intervention.

Examples of such training may include teaching a new assistant how to use text processing software more effectively or educating Starbucks employees on how to select, taste, prepare, and pour coffee (Barron, Berger, & Black, 1997; Starbucks

One of the pioneers of such research was Gorge Becker who pointed out the importance of workplace training in 1964. As cited by Barron, Berger, & Black (1997), Becker argues that work productivity depends on the combination of the skills that employees bring to the job after education and the skills acquired directly at this workplace in the process of work. Irrespective of how generally qualified an employee is, he or she is definitely not aware of peculiarities of a specific job at a specific company. As a result, if the company provides On the Job Training, there is potential that the employee will have a better command of the work-specific skills, will work more productively, and, accordingly, will be more useful to the

As research shows, the significance of workplace learning interventions is not a universal through in the HRM world: there are still instances where companies perceive On the Job Training as a waste of funding (Jacobs, 2003). Such managers claim that employees must bring necessary skills with them, and it is not a task of the company to complete the employees’ education. As a result, companies often deprive themselves of the benefits of the training because they are not ready to spend first.

Thus, another challenge to the implementation of On the Job Training is organizational resistance and reluctance of the responsible managers to introduce new things to their operations (Jacobs, 2003). Accordingly, the general challenges of On the Job Training include either (1) willingness to conduct such training but lack of needed resources, or (2) reluctance to acknowledge the training even though resources for it are provided. Lastly, new staff could learn the bad culture or the shortcuts from On the Job training. Thus, this will impact on the perception of the new staff on the company’s culture and the