ABSTRACT
Organizations invest heavily in training in terms of the sheer numbers of dollars spent on it each year. For example, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) says that in 2013, US companies spent over $164 billion dollars on training and development activity, with employees spending an average of 33.3 hours in training per year. (Figure 8.1 shows the increasing expenditures on training in the US.) And, in countries where training and development are more in their infancy such as in Brazil, investment in these programs is growing by 6-10 percent per year (Cozzo, 2014). It seems that many of these dollars are a wise investment. An article by Aguinis and Kraiger (2009) illustrates the importance of training and development activities to individuals, teams and work groups, organizations, and even to society as whole. In fact, deciding whether to “buy” skilled workers or to hire employees who will need training is one of the key human resources decisions that organizations must make, and there are tradeoffs with each approach.
