The Impact of Training and Development on Employee Performance of Apparel Industry in Sri Lanka

The main objective of the study is to identify how training and development affects operational level employee performance in the context of the apparel industry in Sri Lanka. The researchers carefully chosen three leading apparel sector companies in Sri Lanka for this study. The reason for selecting this research topic is that it was identified that apparel companies were facing issues where employees make errors and delays and their performance has significantly reduced. It was identified that there are mistakes and delays from machine operators’ side which affects target achievement, thereby shipment delays to the end customer. Over the last year, there was an error rate of 5 percent which causes a massive waste of materials and fabric. Key performance indicator achievement fell by 10 percent which hit revenue adversely and this has led to customers delaying payments and moving on to competitors who are more punctual. This demonstrates the importance of training and development which will reduce errors, mistakes and delays. The independent variables considered were orientation training, coaching, job rotation, mentoring and continuous job training while the dependent variable was employee performance in the apparel industry. A structured questionnaire was used to gather data which was distributed to 210 respondents who were selected on convenience sampling. The findings denoted that there is a strong positive impact of all independent variables on the dependent variable.