Supportive activities

Supportive activities may be broadly considered under two categories, enabling activities and empowering activities. Enabling activities help the individual and aim at helping him to acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, attitudes and other behavioural inputs needed to perform his or her duties, with competence and up to expectations. Conventional training activities belong to this category. There is a job description and job expectation.
An analysis is made to identify the necessary inputs that have to the person. With on the job experience, such learnings will be consolidated and that the individual will show improved performance. The accent here is on equipping the individual to perform adequately. Of course there are differences among the individuals and this has to be accepted. While one may aim at enabling all the persons concerned, at least to a required minimal levl, it may not be either possible or desirable to expect all to be equally competent.
Recently, it has been realized that job requirements keep changing in view of developments in science and technology and therefore one talks of refresher training or orientation programmes etc.
The accent is on making the trainee acquire normatively prescribed knowledge and skills. Almost all educational and training activities belong to the category. The effort is to bring about changes necessary for minimal or average performance. This is not made explicit but eloquently implicit to most trainees. The target is a group or category of persons or employees through the medium and consequently the training, teaching and strategies are individualistic. It is assumed that if every person is trained, they will add up and gives us at least an efficient if not effective output. There is a hope of aarithmetic addition which is assumed at two levels. The first level is that all trained individual add to become a good force. The second level is that if an individual is trained or educated on a number of isolated elements, all these will add up to produce a good result.