The liberalisation of economic activities has an impact upon the nature of work of an organisation, employment, labour markets and employee. It is evident that MNCs has opened production sites at various locations around the world and these production sites can be relocated easily according to the company's objectives. This relocation of production sites of multinational companies affects the employee and HR practices.

The multinational companies are thought agents of change. They bring new information's and thinking for the local organisations and the latter follow these ideas and standard in the field of HR.

Traditionally, retailing even wholesaling is considered as a localized sector, which means composed of small-scale operations. The introduction of various laws that encourage free

trade or lessen trade barriers through international treaties has made commerce vital to attain economic growth resulting in lesser barriers in worldwide employment.

Huge multinational or national retail chains are considered among the largest businesses in many developed countries, and accounted for a huge share of the approximately US$6.5 trillion in international commercial transactions in 1997.

There are various contributing factor for this phenomenon. Leading among them are the technological advancements (including electronic commerce for instance) introduced, the international movement of enterprises and quickly spreading competition-driven changes such as just-in-time production and sales. Ironically, these are considered both the cause and result of an increasingly integrated and highly competitive global market that deeply affect the organization and human resource strategy of commercial organizations. Despite its development and dynamism, deterioration of employment and working conditions are also getting prevalent causing concern among business organizations.

The trends of regionalization and the effects of global operations have heightened the need to set up HRD strategies to acquire and retain competent workforce for them to maintain competitive market positions. The skill shortages often pertain to managerial and professional skills, clerical and production workers and an overall shortage of IT skills for all economies.

It is important to keep the capabilities of both managers and workers presently working for the business at the same time introduce structural changes to allow a smooth transition to higher value-added industries. The solution for the multi-national companies as well as local companies in production sites and strategic regional centers could be in better forecasting of HRD needs, a cost-benefit training framework, better labor market policy-making, and quality vocational and training programs that are jointly conducted by the government and the private sector.

Help, Here Come the Computers

Most people worried about that but generally their worries would be closer to home. Family, home and jobs were what people worried most about - just like now really! A major worry was jobs and the increasing use in the workplace of a recent interloper - the computer!

Let's face it. Computers and robots do not get tired. They do not need sleep. They do not get bored when they do the same thing over and over again. They don't even go on strike!

In the manufacturing industries, for examples, the production of motor vehicles was becoming mechanized. Robots took over from people in the putting together of cars. Since 1980 the amount of jobs in manufacturing in the UK has halved. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

Administrators and secretaries found that they were no longer in such demand because their managers would acquire the skills that had traditionally done by them. The age of “Take a letter, Miss Jones” came to an end in that decade. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

In publishing, the old fashioned way of producing pages of a newspaper or magazine - typesetting - which took a long time to learn - were beginning to be phased out. New software packages such as PageMaker and Quark were making traditional methods look old fashioned, time consuming and expensive. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

Essentially, as long as machinery (sometimes called robots) and computers cost less than employing a large number of skilled workers then businesses will make every effort to replace them with machines. Are we doomed, like George Jetson in the old cartoon series set in a possible future, The Jetsons, to sit at a disk and push one button again and again all day long?

The Humans Fight Back

As we know now, the revolution in personal computers and robotics in the 1980s was not the end of the world. However, what the work force in general discovered was that as computers evolved then they had to learn to adapt to this continual change.

A lot of people, it is true, discovered that heir skills, gained over a long period of time, were now redundant. In other words, they - and their skills - were not needed anymore. Some people never worked again. However, most people in this situation moved on and discovered new skills which could make them a living. Between 1997 and 2002 alone the amount of jobs in the UK in the technology industry doubled!

Technology has not destroyed jobs and then stood still. After all, it is human needs that push technology - and we all need to work at some point in our lives! ICT created new markets (online shopping is just one example). The whole process is called “creative destruction” by economists. In other words, when something is destroyed then something else comes along to replace it. For almost three decades that is the way the major economies of the world have operated.

ICT, then, does not really destroy jobs. It moves them around. Databases did not completely replace filing; plenty of people still do that. People still have to deliver the post. However, these things are now done in conjunction with technology, not independent of it.

What ICT does mean, though, is that any skills you have today may not be need tomorrow. This of course upsets people, but what they must do is get over it. So, you go on a course to learn something and then find in two years that it has been replaced by something else - then learn that something else!

The focus of an individual's working life in the 21st century must be on training and then, sorry, retraining! Employers too, must understand this and so many progressive organizations now have much more active training programmes than they ever had as they have realized its importance. Of course, the greatest responsibility is on the individual.

Remember the dinosaurs? Their remains were only discovered because people developed new tools to discover them. Use your new tools to see what you can discover - or even become!

NEXT:  Capacity – Increasing Levels of Achievement

The Teacher/Trainer

Chalk and Talk! That is how people used to refer to teaching. The teacher would have a blackboard, some chalk and a board duster. They would then "talk" through what was to be learned - making notes on the blackboard as they progressed through the class. The students would be expected to make notes: after all, once the teacher had used the board duster, then the lesson would effectively be gone forever. The blackboard was replaced by the whiteboard and instead of chalk then pens would be used. However, the theory was still the same.

In the early nineties the concept of the SMART board was introduced to class rooms. This is a screen that is controlled by touch and it works with a computer and a projector. What is input in to the computer can be projected on to the screen and the teacher - or students for that matter - can write on the board with digital pens. The board can also be used to present information using such software as Microsoft PowerPoint.

Many education and training centres also employ what is known as a VLE - a Virtual Learning Environment. This is a tool to manage course rather than teaching itself and is becoming essential for teachers to understand as it makes the administration of a course much easier. The system can show how students are doing and can be tied in with reports that detail their attendance and punctuality. They are often used to help with "distance" learning where the educator and student are separated geographically buy they are increasingly used to supplement one-on-one and group teaching within the classroom.

As the complexity of these systems increases more tools are becoming available for teacher and student alike. Examples include interactive quizzes, discussion boards and chat rooms and wiki spaces which mimic websites such as Facebook.

One advantage of using an electronic system such as a VLE is that classes can retain a permanent reminder. Notes about classes can be posted up on the system and those students who need to revise more or perhaps missed the original class can read and review the information. The information can also be shared around other teaching professionals so that a bank of materials can be created. So, one teacher can create an excellent idea for a class and share it with many others.

Most teachers are not "digital natives" to begin with! In other words, many of them are old enough to have started teaching before ICT had made any impact on education or the classroom. So, many have had to upgrade their skills in order to move with the times and for a huge amount this has meant the acquisition of completely new ICT skills.

However, technology will never replace good teaching as the primary best way to learn!

The Architect

The late eighties saw the introduction of CAD or Computer Aided Design in to the field of Architecture. It was adopted first by technical drafting staff and a short while later by the architects themselves. Previously, designers and architects would work at a draughtboard with hardware. In other words, pencils, rulers, erasers, sharpeners - the tools of the trade! If a major mistake was made with the design of a building it would be very costly to go back and put it right: often it meant starting a design again by scratch.

CAD meant that the architect not only had to be a good architect but had to acquire additional skills. ICT skills are now essential and the architect or designer must be able to communicate their designs using a mouse or another input device such as a digitizer.

The Librarian or Archivist

Libraries used to be about books, books and more books! That is still true, but to a lesser extent. If you go to a library these days you will come across a lot of computers that can be used for a variety of things. Of course, the librarians must now be able to use ICT in order to help the people who wish to use the library.

When someone wanted to borrow a book, what would happen in the past is that the book would be stamped and a note made in the lender's record by hand that they had loaned a book from the library. Now, all of that is usually automated which means that librarians must be able to use that system and so, necessarily, be ICT literate.

Requests and searches for certain books can be done online as well, so that a series of libraries run by an authority does not need to have multiple copies of rarely read books in all of their outlets. Instead, when one is requested it can be ordered online and be sent to the outlet closest to the person who wishes to borrow it. Again, the librarians must have the associated computing skills needed to do this.

The Manager

Twenty or thirty years ago managers would have a lot more staff around to help them out than they do now. A manager would normally have a secretary who would help him or her out with such things as letter writing, filing and general administrative duties that were traditionally time consuming and would not be requisite with a manager's salary.

With the introduction of ICT, tasks could be completed far quicker than in previous years and the need for a lot of support staff lessened. Now, managers are generally expected to compose and write (and send!) their own letters, memos and emails.

Many companies would traditionally train secretaries so that they would know the standards of communications used within the organizations. This would include how letters and reports were to be laid out and the kind of language to be used. Many companies now have documents that describe these systems so that any individual worker can acquire this knowledge and use it. This is often known as an "in house" style.

Managers must generally be much more ICT literate and aware than even ten years ago. Skills that may have been taught to a typist or secretary would now be expected of a manager as well.

NEXT: Complexity - More jobs

Technology is all about change. Lots of change! These changes tend to enable us to do more things with this technology as the interfaces between the user and the technology becomes more and more user friendly. What is adds up to is an increase in complexity.

It's a hard word to get to grips with, complexity. One thing that many people do not seem to do anymore is use a dictionary. Let's go against this trend and have a look what the dictionaries have to say about the word.

Ouch! Most dictionaries will say something like “the quality or state of being complex”. Fantastic! A great help! Not!

So what is meant by the word complexity in relation to ICT? It could mean difficult but that is not really the point in terms of computers. Certainly, the knowledge of ICT we must have these days is more involved and intricate then ever before and that is where we are getting close to what is meant by the word.

Cast your mind back ten years. If you are a teenager right now, then ask an older person to do so! Can you remember getting your first mobile phone? It was hard to figure out at first, am I right? As for the manual that came with it, it would have made as much sense if it had been written in Martian! Now, think of the ease with which you use your mobile now, the speed at which you can text, the times you use it to connect with the internet, the games you play on it, the Bluetooth technology you use with it, the videos and tunes you download via your mobile.

Now imagine your past self ten years ago. If you had been asked if you could use or even would use all these complicated features, would your answer automatically have been a yes?

What you have done is adapted, over time, to the shift in mobile technology from being a simple tool with which to talk to others, to a multifaceted tool that you can use for all sorts of things.

So, my first message is this. Do not be freaked out by the complexity of ICT. You will adapt! Change happens, things get more complex, but it is something that you should embrace, not run away from.

WHAT THINGS BECOME

Life, eh? Complicated, difficult and often confusing. Most people would agree that out lives have become more complex and this is partly down to technology and the pace of change going on all around us. As we get older, too, we do not respond as well to change as when we were young. Can you remember seeing older people on the phone to a family member in another country and shouting rather than talking? They thought that it would enable the other person to hear them better if they shouted because they were so far away. How we chuckled! What we must try to avoid is loosing our ability to adapt. Change is going to happen however we resist it. Plus, the sheer scale of change over the last 50 years has been enormous. The way that organization work and operate has changed enormously. What organizations produce has also changed with a shift, in the UK at least, from manufacture to service (or even information) economies. How people work has changed, too.

Today, over 300,000 people make a living trading on eBay. Use a time machine and go back twenty years. Ask someone what eBay is. You would get a blank look!

So, change happens and it get more and more complex. You will be expected to adapt to these changes. If you work for an organization for a long time - say twenty years - your experience will be much greater than an employee who has just finished university or college. However, when new technology is introduced, long servers can often get confused by the changes and are quite often regarded by the younger workers as "dinosaurs". It is more important than ever to welcome change, work with it and adapt to it.

ICT could be your downfall. Make sure it's your saviour!

NEXT: The skills you need to use new technology

Capacity

Private organizations usually have a single aim - to make money, otherwise known as a profit! This usually leads to an effort to increase their capacity. This is a combination of increasing the amount of work an individual does to the end game of increasing the level of production. More and more organizations have become reliant on using ICT to achieve this end.

Trends

We will look at recent trends in the use of ICT - to try and make sense of what change is happening in the work place because of ICT and to see how these trends could go in the future. A good k knowledge of recent trends enables organizations to better prepare for the future and this feeds down to the employees. If you know what is going on you can anticipate what might happen in the future. This makes you more employable.

The Working Environment

How has ICT changed the working environment? In one word, enormously! From the layout of the offices in which we work, the location of our work places and opportunities such as working from home the introduction of ICT in to the work place has had a huge impact on the way work is done. We will look at these changes and consider aspects of these changes that may be cause for concern! We will then address how to limit any negative aspects that may have come about because of ICT in the working environment.

Some facts to ponder:

What does the future hold?

• By 2010 the top 10 “In demand” jobs did not exist in 2003
• Most students at College at the moment are preparing for jobs that do not yet exist
• They will be using technologies throughout their working lives that have yet to be invented!
• They will be solving problems that we do not even know exist at the moment!
• In September 2006 there were 106 million registered users of Myspace
• If that was a country it would be the 11th largest in the world
• There are almost 3 billion Google searches every month (who did we ask before?)

Business or commerce on the internet is a straining beast, which the federal and state governments are attempting to control. In both cases, it is a matter of the technology out-pacing the abilities of both bureaucrats and politicians.

E-commerce or business on the internet as it is called, promises speed, efficiency and security. First, it is essential to understand some of the history of the internet. It was originally created by DARPA (Department of Advanced Research Project Agency) for project administration as well as command and control to strategic armed forces in the event of a nuclear or conventional attack against the United States of America.

The bulk of those projects were involved in “black operations” such as stealth aircraft, advanced surface-to-air missile defense, phased-arrayed radar for early warning and remote spy satellites. Other highly classified intelligence databases were shared between various government agencies during the cold war. This provided us the speed and reaction time necessary to win the counter-intelligence war by the end of 1990. In 1994 DARPA and the Federal Government essentially sold the existing five networks or "backbones" of what was to become the internet.

Understanding of how commerce is conducted on the internet today requires that you first understand how the internet works. When you shop on the internet, you may see something in a merchant website that you wish to purchase. The merchant's web site has a catalog on one or many web pages through an ordering software embedded in the web page, this is named a “shopping cart”.

This software supplies an order identifier that specified the amount of product order, cost per item, delivery address and credit card payment information. This order is sent through the internet using security protocols to an online transaction server. The order is logged into the database and is sent to a designated processing network that negotiates the payment from the consumer's bank to the merchant's bank.

Upon completion of this financial negotiation, the order is filled by the merchant and shipped to you the consumer. This process can take minutes where it once involved hours either driving to the shopping center or waiting on the telephone line talking with a customer representative (Gibson John ).

There are several advantages to a business using the internet. It offers speed of commercial transaction, lower and more efficient stock management, reduced personnel costs and timely deposit of funds. It also allows you a wider area to shop; the entire world is your market with e-commerce.

Essentially, it provides your customer with a total satisfaction packet if handled correctly. It is a superlative platform for marketing your product, offering a means to display your inventory. If an e-commerce is handled correctly, it can mean that a business can provide a product in a timely fashion. It also means that an e-commerce can operate with less overhead if it can guarantee customer orders and store restock.

There are certain privacy issues and security matters for individuals and businesses using e-commerce on the internet. Internet Merchant Bank Account provides e-commerce the means to manage financial transactions directly with the merchant's bank without the need for an online transactional server. It provides security directly with a thinner IT process, which translate into faster e-commerce. It also allows the business to conduct overseas transactions.

If you are an internet business you should also obtain a Digital Certificate, this allows credit card transactions securely without the possibility of identity theft. These are obtained from the web host as part of the monthly charge or as an additional charge. A Digital Certificate is mandatory if you use credit cards as a basis of your financial transactions while conducting an e-commerce.

E-commerce management control issues. One of the many management issues is finding the correct web host. A web host should have high-speed connections with the internet at least T2 or higher. The speed of doing business online is determined by not just the speed of the connection to the internet server provider but of the ability of the web host to handle a specific number of web site transactions. This is known as the transaction allocation; if it is too small then the time necessary to transact business is too long and will cost you clients.

If you are a large internet-based business, consider an Internet Merchant Bank Account, or if you are a smaller business, consider using an Online Transaction Server. These are entirely focused on financial transactions performed on the internet and offer focused response.

Shopping cart software is either available for several hundred dollars or obtainable from either web hosts or Online Transaction Server providers for a monthly fee.Timeliness of filling orders at warehouse, credits and debits to various banks can be addressed through choosing the best bank or Online Transaction Server or credit card companies.

The future of e-commerce can be as great as or even greater than any other business outside the internet. This is because it is based on the same principles of “regular” businesses. Successful businesses are built when there has been adequate marketing research on their product, a professional management team, efficient post-sales services, achievable and realistic business goals, an outstanding IT staff and computer equipment.

Success in e-commerce or any business will succeed if you understand the customers, know that you are in a competitive environment, know your market, know your abilities, coordinate, obtain the cooperation of employees and senior management, maintain strict attention to a schedule, follow the business plan and avoid security compromises.