ABSTRACT
This chapter examines closely the concept and practice of training under conditions of lifetime employment in order to show why differences in training effort will not be revealed by differences in training budgets. It has long been accepted, almost as an article of faith, that Japanese companies spend more on training their employees than do their British counterparts. Most attention to the impact of the lifetime employment system on skill development has tended to assert rather simply that there will be more training by volume without considering the way in which lifetime employment changed the nature of training philosophy and practice. It is becoming a conventional wisdom of the human resource development literature to argue that firms must explore the implications for their human resources of their business strategies. Japan provides, instead, many examples of companies which have grown by diversification based on technology.
