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Browsing Masters by Subject ", construction industry"

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    Impact of human capital development on the performance of Ghanaian Road Contractors
    (2015-04-23) Deku, Godfred
    The palpable contribution of Human Capital Development to the growth of an economy cannot be overstated. The Construction industry provides infrastructure that supports the other sectors of the economy. Unfortunately, the industry is saddled with numerous challenges varying from internal weaknesses to external threats that affect and influence its performance. The success of any organisation and by extension any industry depends on the human capital available. The construction industry has been identified to lack human capital militating against the delivery of quality of products expected of them. The surge of foreign contractors further dictates that the local contractors need to raise their standards if they need to remain in operation. The study was aimed at assessing the impact of human capital development on performance of road projects in Ghanaian construction industry. The research focused on Class A2B2 Ghanaian road contractors and their performance on feeder roads projects in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. A questionnaire survey approach involving 21 professionals in various road construction companies was used. The questionnaire sought to elicit response from the sample by adopting close ended questions and the use of the Likert scale. Subsequently, the response data was analysed using descriptive statistics, relative importance index and cross tabulation to estimate the relationship between the variables. The findings revealed that orientation of new employees was a common practice in most surveyed companies towards human capital development. The remaining activities such as Periodic on the job training, Performance appraisals, and Sponsorship training programmes among others were not deemed to be significant. Project performance was also examined against Time, Cost and Quality. Whereas most projects were completed on time, these projects mostly exceeded the budgeted cost leading to cost overruns. Lack of financial resources, Lack of central development and regulatory agency, Cost of Human Capital Development and High employee mobility were identified as the critical challenges to human capital development. Thus the study re-echoed the need for a central development and regulatory agency to enforce the improvement of skills, knowledge and professional development in the Ghanaian construction industry. The limitation of the study included the use of a small sample size due to the research focus. Keywords: Human capital, development, construction industry, road contractors.