Firm Characteristics and T&D Practice Gaps among Large Manufacturing Firms in Ethiopia

The purpose of this study was to see the relationships among characteristics of large manufacturing firms; to explore if levels of employee training and development (T&D) design practices differed among the firms based on those characteristics; and to investigate the magnitude and nature of gaps between levels of T&D design practices. For data collection, samples of 134 (66%) firms were selected based on proportional stratified random sampling technique out of 196 public and private large manufacturing establishments from 13 industry groups. The response rate was 57%. Data collection instruments were developed based on ADDIE model for training design and theory of planned behavior. Both validity and reliability were established for the instruments. For data analysis, descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and t-tests were employed. Findings showed that there were associations among distributions of some firm characteristics while no evidences of associations were found for others. Furthermore, current and desired levels of T&D design practices were found to be significantly different among firms based on some firm characteristics. The practice gaps on training design/development and evaluation stages were significantly larger compared to the stages of training need analysis and implementation. The results have enormous firm-level implications in terms of shaping their HRD interventions.