The study is being carried out taking into consideration the significance of both Training & Development (T & D) and Employee Performance for the businesses at all levels and in all sectors. Banking sector is chosen as representative due to its backing up role in the economy of any country. It is most crucial for services businesses to keep their employees’ knowledge and competencies up to the mark because of the global saturation occurring in services. Economies are becoming services’ led so competition is being added up and strengthened by leaps & bounds. In such a situation, it becomes of prime concern for the organizations particularly servicing organizations like banks to capture new knowledge for serving competitively, store & preserve this knowledge, and then deliver it to the employees using some organized & methodical approach. Now what such an approach could be other than designing strategic and well suited T & D programs. Taking an account of all this, a descriptive & quite explanatory approach is being chosen to carry out a study for checking out the impact that T & D has on the performance level of employees working in the banks of Pakistan. Three objectives were designed for the study; assessment of current practices, impact check, and proposition for better investment into T & D. This has been done selecting six representative banks of Bahawalpur (Bank Alfalah Limited, Muslim Commercial Bank, Habib Bank Limited, Allied Bank Limited, National Bank of Pakistan, and Bank of Punjab) as sampling unit. Employees in these banks were given a structured questionnaire that was designed to particularly measure the influence of T & D on respondents’ skills like Job knowledge, work quality & quantity, functional skills, and their motivation & loyalty. Data collection was done taking sample size of 150 employees while receiving 104 valid responses using convenience & referral sampling. Analysis was done through the application of frequency tests & bar charts on the response rates in SPSS. This gives the study a quantitative and empirical direction for results. So, then we checked the influence of T & D on the skills and attitudes mentioned above for associating these to employee performance level in banks of Pakistan as presented in the conceptual model. Major findings were that most of the employees agreed to the item statements by making it clear that T & D had a positive impact on their Job knowledge, work quality & quantity, functional skills, and their motivation & loyalty and these are all linked to their performance either strongly or moderately but in a supporting direction. Hence, the study concluded up with T & D positively impacting the employees’ performance in the banks of Pakistan.
Keywords: Employee Performance, Loyalty, Motivation, Training & Development, functional skills, job knowledge, quality & quantity of work
