Question

Section A: Short Questions (35 marks)
1. According to Schwab (2016) the arrival of the 4th industrial revolution has made it difficult to properly use and analyse historical data, as a result of new technologies and training methods. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Explain your answer. (5 mark)
2. How has technology improve the following job training methods? (9 marks)
 Internships (3 marks)
 Business games (3 marks)
 Committee assignments (3marks)
3. Jedi Industries wants to use a training system that is individualize, including individual performance and a great deal of time and research. Which training system would you recommend for the company and why would you commend this system? (10 marks)
4. Discuss and compare the differences between close-ended interviews and open-close ended questionnaires. (6 marks)
5. In your opinion, has the Skills Development Act No. 97 of 1998 improved the state of training and development in South Africa. Argue your answer. (5 marks)

Section B: Essay (25 marks)
President Cyril Ramaphosa officially opened and addressed the first 4th Industrial Revolution SA - Digital Economy Summit. The Summit was hosted by the 4th Industrial Revolution South Africa partnership (4IRSA), an alliance between partners from the public and private sectors, academia and civil society. The 4IRSA partnership seeks to develop Human Resource practices that will enhance training and development in South Africa. Furthermore, the summit presented plans to develop training procedures that will be inclusive, coherent and responsive to the 4IR in the country. The president was quoted saying "Training programmes must allow learner's to be evaluated in the workplace after a period of approximately 6 months to determine whether their performance has improved and whether these improvement contributed to the achievement of objectives".
Use the statement above to identify the training level of needs the summit intended to highlight as well as the evaluation method the President suggested during the summit. Furthermore, briefly analyse the potential impact of the 4IR on the following classrooms. (20 marks)
 Interactive television classroom
 Distance learning
 Computer based training
Essay structure: (5 marks)
Introduction, Body, Conclusion- (3 mark)
Proper Harvard Reference List- (2 marks)

Answer 1

1) The Fourth Industrial revolution refers to the current industrial world we live in which is dominated by the presence, ubiquity and power of the Internet and connected devices. Technological advances in communication, biotech and medicine have now become central to our own to the extent that we cannot imagine daily subsistence without smartphones, broadband, etc. To provide a perspective, this period has come after the preceding three industrial revolutions - the first one began in the 1760s with mechanization and probably the invention of the steam engine which represented a big change in terms of the scale of physical work that human beings could achieve. Then came the second revolution led by new sources of energy - electricity, gas and oil in the 1870s. The third revolution was largely triggered by development of nuclear and also semiconductor technology in the 1960s which led to the wave of computing.

In this context today Technology is at the forefront of disruption in most things and a key fall out of that is the amount and complexity of data that we generate today. There is so much data across various platforms that we interact with daily and they are in various different formats. We now live in a context where we are required to make real-time decisions at a growing pace by putting together various formats of data such as vocal, pictorial, videos, spreadsheets, presentations etc. and taking intelligent decisions for business or other purposes. This increasingly demands better analytical capability and has led to the growth of artificial intelligence as an area of research and application.

This has impacted training as well both in terms of the kind of skills people in various functions need to have and also the way training is delivered in organizations. For example it is now expected that people will have access to and also be able to use and configure tech devices (e.g. apps on smartphones) as a hygeine skill. Similarly training can now be delivered via video conferencing and an average person is expected to know and handle basic issues which otherwise would be left to IT experts.

In summary it would be wise to agree that the industrial revolution has made it difficult to use and analyse historical data across dimensions, over time and in various formats

2) Technology has certainly improved things on Internships and opportunities available for interns in any business organization. The number of opportunities for freelancers, entry level professionals and semi-skilled personnel has increased significantly because of the use of technology and the need to drive business via use of technology - telecalling, telesales, BPOs are prime examples especially across the developing world. Presence of app based business platforms facilitating ride-sharing (Uber etc.) , space-sharing (Air BnB etc.) have also led to the growth of a gig economy around the world. Within organizations the need to crunch transactional data on a daily basis has led to more opportunities in data science at both intern levels and higher levels too.

Business Games as a training tool have also evolved with the use of technology. This form of training is about simulation of real-world management scenario in a controlled environment and individuals learning via role playing techniques. A lot of gamification has moved online with simulator apps which individuals can access through their smartphones, tablets and other devices. Simulation based strategy games can also be played over the network on a computer for example - team building exercises can now be taken across geographies, and this works well for large multinational organizations.

Committee Assignments (where individuals are assigned tasks of taking managerial decisions via a committee approach) have improved due to the lower amount of time required to complete these assignments and also the fact that the committee does not need to be together in one place to have the session. This results in much more effectiveness of training delivery and also lower costs for the organization.