Job Training in U.S. Organizations
基于1991年全国组织调查数据，分析了688家美国企业的正式职业培训实践，发现培训在内部结构复杂、市场环境多变的企业中最普遍，并探讨了培训如何应对技术变革和市场竞争。
We draw hypotheses about the factors related to company provision offormal job training programs from diverse theoretical perspectives and research findings. Using data from the 1991 National Organizations Survey, we analyze a sample of 688 establishments to estimate multivariate models. The relationships between employer-provided job training and organizational size, unionization, and workforce composition are reduced or eliminated in most multivariate equations. Employer-provided training is most extensive in establishments with elaborate internal structures that operate in complex market environments. The job-training practices of U.S. employers affect employees from the executive suite to the loading dock, enhancing skills from basic literacy to interpersonal sensitivity. A new training ideology is rapidly eclipsing the traditional segmented pattern-a pattern in which universities educate the professionals and technicians, companies prime the executives, unions apprentice workers in the skilled trades, and government prepares the disadvantaged. Facing competitive world economic pressures that have eroded America's market positions, employers are now using job training as one means of coping with changes fostered by technological innovation, market competition, organizational restructuring, and demographic shifts. Although training is an integral part of the employer-employee relationship, direct evidence about company training practices based on representative samples of diverse employing organizations is almost nonexistent. Most previous research has drawn on either self-reported labor force surveys or highly restricted samples of organizations (typically skewed to very large firms). We examine hypotheses about employer-provided job-training practices in the early 1990s, using a national survey of U.S. work organizations.