Open Access

Eileen Brüggemann

• Personal and professional development is a great incentive for many employees to apply for a job with a company. If this is lacking, however, it can also be a reason to look for a new employer. Now it can be assumed that personnel development looks different in every company. Given this diversity, how can you choose a company if you want to continue your education? How should one know how the personnel development in a company is regulated? One can divide company structure and culture into hierarchical, traditional, or agile, known as dynamic and adapting. Are there differences in their ways to develop their employees that could help applicants to know how their development will be in a company? The paper deals with the theoretical investigation of possible differences between the human resource development in agile and in hierarchical organisations, followed by partly-structured expert interviews with experts out of eight companies about how they manage their employee development and exchange of knowledge. They were categorized in agile and hierarchical according to some structural and cultural questions at the beginning. The question of this paper is, if there are tendencies of the same kind of organization in terms of structure and culture, to also have the same approach of Human resource development. Further the study is conducted to find out if there are differences in the tendencies between hierarchical and agile organizations, as well as where they lie. The results suggest that there are tendencies of the same kind of organization to have a similar approach to their human resource development. Differences could be found in terms of distribution of responsibility, frequency and content of feedback meetings and used methods for training and knowledge exchange. This is important for companies who want to compare and improve their approach and for people who want to apply to companies but want to know beforehand their responsibility for their training and how the process is going to be.