Week 5 — Overall Study Guide

Week 5 turns BUS 623 toward training and development — the organizational function responsible for closing the gap between the skills a workforce has and the skills the marketplace demands. The Overview page frames the week around three forces driving the growing demand for workplace training: change, growth, and global competition. Organizations must continually assess what skills the workplace will need next, then identify the gap between current employee capability and that future demand, and finally design training that closes it. Chapter 15 of Cascio and Aguinis supplies the design-stage considerations — the organizational and individual factors that shape whether a training program will work at all — while Chapter 16 carries the arc forward into implementation, instructional-design principles, and the measurement of whether training actually produced a result worth having.

The week's own deliverables follow the same personal-to-organizational progression the Overview page describes: you first assess your own training needs by building an individual development plan, then move outward to design a training program for a fictional organization, and finally apply everything to a real, named company — Amazon — in the week's largest assignment. This is the second of a three-part case sequence: Week 4's assignment worked Amazon's recruiting and selection challenge, this week's assignment carries the same company into training implementation and outcome measurement, and the Week 6 final presentation will complete the arc. Reading this week's material with Amazon's growth story already in mind — a company hiring and promoting managers faster than most organizations ever will — makes both discussions and the assignment easier to write with specificity rather than generic training-textbook language.

Overview Table of Deliverables

The table below reproduces the Week 5 Overview page's deliverable table exactly. Three assessments carry weight this week, together worth 14% of the course grade.

The Canvas Overview page lists four Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs) this week — one more than most weeks, reflecting how much ground the training-and-development arc covers. They are reproduced verbatim below, each followed by a note on what it actually requires of you and where in the week it is assessed.

Read the four outcomes as a single design-to-evaluation arc. WLO 1 starts at the individual level — you cannot design training for an organization until you have practiced identifying a training need in yourself. WLO 2 and WLO 3 supply the organizational and instructional-design vocabulary a real program is built from. WLO 4 is where all three converge: applying that vocabulary to a real company's real growth problem and being honest about whether the resulting training actually worked. The course tags each deliverable to a specific WLO, so naming the relevant concepts explicitly in your posts and paper is cheap insurance on the grade.

The required text for the course is Cascio, W. F., & Aguinis, H. (2019). Applied Psychology in Talent Management (8th ed.). SAGE Publications, available in full text through the Ebook Central database in the UAGC Library. Week 5 assigns two chapters; the Canvas Resources page describes each and ties it to specific deliverables.

For a full walk-through of each chapter's frameworks, key terms, and closing questions, see the dedicated Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 deep-dive study guides on this site — this overview does not repeat that material, only where it lands in the week's work.

Articles and the Webpage Resource

Beyond the two textbook chapters, the Resources page names four articles and one career-advice webpage that anchor the week's discussion and assignment work.

• Bourne, T. (2021). Starting from scratch: The assignment: Form a talent development function that balances strategic priorities, regulatory training, and employee career development needs. TD Magazine, 75(9), 48–53. Explains how to build a balanced talent development function, including how to assemble a team suited to the work; assists the Training Development Design discussion and the Amazon assignment.
• Fuller, J., & Raman, M. (2023). The high cost of neglecting low-wage workers. Harvard Business Review, 101(3), 40–48. Covers how low-wage employees are often overlooked by employers despite wanting to stay with the company; assists the Amazon assignment.
• Martinelli, M., & Weinbauer-Heidel, I. (2023). Design tactics for training transfer: Maximize learning transfer to the job. TD Magazine, 77(9), 20–25. Covers the importance of designing training around employees' actual needs so learning transfers to the job; assists the Training Development Design discussion.
• Wash, G. L. (2023). Improving employee performance through corporate education. Journal of Business and Educational Leadership, 13(1), 95–108. Covers why HR-led development is important to business performance and how HR groups organize employee development programs; assists the Individual Development Plan discussion.
• Indeed. (2023). Individual development plan: What it is and how to write one. Explains how to build an individual development plan step by step; assists the Individual Development Plan discussion directly.

A Recommended (not required) article rounds out the week: Lang, L. (2022). Enter the learning zone. TD Magazine, 76(4), 30–35. It covers why employees and managers must continually learn, develop, and grow to solve increasingly complex problems in a changing organization, and may help with the Individual Development Plan discussion.

Chapter 15 makes the case that a training program's success is largely determined before a single session is delivered — by the organizational and individual characteristics the program is designed around. The chapter surveys the forces increasing the demand for training (change, growth, global competition), the organizational conditions that support or undermine training transfer, the individual differences among learners that any design must account for, and the learning principles — like feedback, reinforcement, and practice — that make training stick once it is delivered. It sets up both of this week's discussion forums: Discussion Forum 1 asks you to apply the chapter's individual-differences lens to your own career, and Discussion Forum 2 asks you to apply the chapter's organizational and individual design considerations to build a training program from scratch.

Chapter 16 carries the arc from design into execution. It surveys concrete training methods — presentation techniques, hands-on methods, group-building methods, and technology-based training — and the principles of instructional design that keep learners actively engaged rather than passively watching a slide deck. The chapter's second half turns to measurement: the essential elements of evaluating whether training produced a result, and the critical distinction between statistically significant effects (a measurable difference that is unlikely to be due to chance) and practically significant effects (a difference large enough to matter in the real, operational sense to the organization). That distinction is not incidental; it is a named requirement of the Amazon assignment.

Week 5 has three graded deliverables, each with a dedicated study guide that takes the prompt apart in full. The summaries below orient you and point you to the right companion document.

6.1 Discussion Forum 1 — Individual Development Plan

Tagged to WLO 1 and CLO 3, worth 3%. After reviewing the Indeed individual-development-plan webpage and the Wash (2023) article on corporate education, you build a personalized individual development plan: define your own professional goals, share your strengths, skills, and interests, describe your career objectives, and identify how you will measure those objectives. The peer-reply twist matters here — you respond to two classmates from the perspective of their management superior, offering additional training ideas for each of their stated goals individually. The initial post runs 200 words minimum, due Day 3; two peer replies are due by Day 7. See the Week 5 Discussion Forum 1 Study Guide.

6.2 Discussion Forum 2 — Training Development Design

Tagged to WLOs 2 and 3 and CLO 3, worth 3%. After reviewing Chapter 15, the Bourne (2021) article, and the Martinelli and Weinbauer-Heidel (2023) article, you take on the voice of someone whose boss has asked them to design an effective training program, and you identify how the program would account for key characteristics of organizations, key characteristics of individuals, learning and individual differences, and principles that enhance learning. The initial post runs 200 words minimum, due Day 3; two peer replies of 100+ words each are due by Day 7. See the Week 5 Discussion Forum 2 Study Guide.

6.3 Assignment — Amazon: Implementation and Measurement of Outcomes

Tagged to WLOs 2, 3, and 4 and CLOs 1, 2, and 3, worth 8%, and due Day 7. A 3–5 page APA paper in which you assess methods of training and development — presentation, hands-on, group-building, or technology-based — for Amazon's managers as the company continues its rapid growth. You evaluate training and development outcomes, discuss the essential elements for measuring training outcomes from Chapter 16, identify the key principles of instructional design that encourage learner participation, and assess training outcomes by distinguishing statistically significant effects from practically efficient effects. This is the second installment of the three-part Amazon case arc that began with Week 4's recruiting and selection assignment and concludes with the Week 6 final presentation — carrying forward the same company keeps the analysis grounded in one continuous, specific growth story rather than a new hypothetical each week. The paper requires at least two credible sources beyond the course text. See the Week 5 Assignment Study Guide.

BUS 623 builds from foundational concepts toward applied, workplace-facing skill, and Week 5 sits at the point where the course turns from getting the right people into the organization toward developing the people already there. Weeks 1–4 built the vocabulary of applied psychology, fair employment law, recruitment, and selection; Week 5 assumes a workforce is already hired and asks how an organization keeps that workforce's skills current against change, growth, and global competition. Week 6's final presentation will draw directly on this week's Amazon work, so the specificity you build into the design and measurement analysis here is not a one-week investment — it is the foundation the course's capstone deliverable is built on.

Treat Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 together as this course's definitive reference on training and development; later weeks that touch performance management or organizational development will assume you already carry this week's distinctions — statistically significant versus practically significant outcomes chief among them — without re-explaining them.