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Non-Instructional Interventions

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The Future

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Future of HPT

HPT Certification is one trend that cannot be denied.  At the time of the writing of Stolovitch and Keeps' Handbook of Human Performance Technology (2nd. Ed.) in 1999, the ability to become a certified HPT professional was not yet in place.  Now just a few short years later, it is becoming ever more commonplace.  Certification provides a degree of consistency and reliability to the HPT profession that business clients value. 

Corporate culture, one aspect of an organization that an HP Technologist must consider when evaluating an organization's performance well-being, is expected to be of greater and greater importance in coming years (Stolovitch and Keeps, 1999).  Particularly when mergers and acquisitions are being considered, the companies involved will pay much closer attention to the alignment that their corporate cultures have, as it tends to be a strong indicator of the success or failure of such a venture.

Other trends that are starting to grow stronger include the demand for flexibility by businesses in the types and implementations of interventions that HPT provides, increased globalization and human cultural issues, and the ever growing and changing world of technology.  

The size of businesses are decreasing and getting more specialized.  This trend will lead to more emphasis on outsourcing for training and other performance improvement needs - namely HPT.

HPT is becoming more and more an international field of practice.  While developing nations are becoming more modern and heading into manufacturing and production economies, the more developed nations are increasing their focus on service oriented businesses.  These business trends will affect the HPT practice heavily in the types of challenges they face.

One opinion of where HPT is going is not altogether upbeat.  Fred Nickols (1990) paints a picture where human performance is not on the rise, but rather on the decline.  His feeling is that manufacturing costs are on such a decline that the main cost component faced by many such firms is labor.  Increasing productivity would seem crucial, but Nickols maintains that eliminating as much human labor as possible should be the goal.  He goes on  to say that managing and leading people effectively is more important than attempting to "engineer" their performance.  He sees a drastic increase for better technical training.

These "complex, social-technical, financial-political, human-machine work systems" seem to fall into the domain of HPT to me.  So even while Nickols expresses concern that individual performance improvement needs are not paramount, he foresees performance improvements that, due to their complexity, indicate all the more highly capable HPT professionals.

As Dale Brethower states (1997, p.8), "The future of human performance technology (HPT), and those who practice it effectively, is bright because of changes occurring in the marketplace...Its emphasis on performance improvement works very well in relatively small, well-focused organizations.  For  more than 25 years, HPT has focused on providing human performance.  The future for HPT will be very bright if we can take advantage of the opportunities before us."