I agree with Fred’s decision to use a thrid party vendor to conduct the training for the hardware store. Training activities need to be aligned with the organization’s strategy to be effective (Blanchard & Thacker, 2010). Persons of leadership should determine the strategy but they should not rule out the input that could be beneficial from lower level employees. The management team met and discussed its strategic response and determined that the hardware store would focus on particular items and make personalized service the cornerstone of its effort (Blanchard & Thacker, 2010). Now that the target training areas are identified you can determine who will be doing the training and using what strategy. Fred decided to use an outsourcing strategy. This strategy employs outside training vendors for all, or almost all, training activities and provides a flexible way of meeting changing and diverse training needs with professionally developed and administered programs. (Blanchard & Thacker, 2010). It is imperative to isolate who needs to be trained and who will be doing the training. Key things when finding a trainer is to find out their background, work experience, clients, customers, etc. To be effective, the training process is not as easy as it comes across. There are many strategies and concepts at your disposal but the challenging part is deciding which one to use. In this case it was deciding the best training package to utilize.

Before choosing a training package Fred should do a Training Needs Analysis (TNA). The training needs analysis process is a series of activities conducted to identify problems or other issues in the workplace, and to determine whether training is an appropriate response (Hasan, 2007). A TNA is important because it helps determine whether training can correct the performance problem. In some cases, the TNA indicates that