**3. Wrapping up and looking back**

The importance of a dynamic national stock of human capital, with world class education, skills and competencies, can never be emphasised enough for its significance in improving country competitiveness. Country competitiveness is enhanced through training or human capital development, which is the collective skills and competencies of a team, including on-the-job training, built upon high school or university education. Collectively, the human capital possessed by a team, contribute to both individual and organisational productivity, national wealth and long-term sustainability. However, although it has been proven over and over that human productivity improves as human capital improves, the matter of estimating the benefits versus the cost to investors who are typically employers, remains top of mind for management practitioners, academics and policy makers alike.

#### *The Emergence of Risk and Return on Human Capital Development DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96363*

The complexity of the operating environment and the myriad of influences from the external environment, necessitates the continuous monitoring, fine-tuning and impact evaluation of human capital development. Dynamic teams that can adapt to a volatile external environment with greater ease and a management team that is able to anticipate volatility and market demands, sense, seize and reconfigure VRIN resources in good time, is in itself a dynamic capability for any organisation. However, the agents involved may have varied agendas, such as legal compliance or spending allocated budgets, and not necessarily real outcomes in the form of productivity gains. Continuous management efforts to calculate the benefits of training will help inform future spending on human capital development, for which more and more justification is required in the face of tightening financial constraints. If management can perform training evaluation systematically, and with the use of an accurate instrument, the benefits of training on a micro and macro level will become visible and manageable. On the contrary, continuous failure to prove the return on an investment in human capital, may lead to a number of risks, such as ill-informed spending decisions, loss of critical members of a workforce, and non-compliance to organisational policies or strategies. Management may be held personally accountable for such failure.

Good corporate governance makes it a management responsibility to ensure adequate human capital and the efficient enhancement of it through training. Efficiency can only be determined with the use of a tool, such as the Kirkpatrick-Phillips Five-level ROI framework or similar recognised evaluation tools. Risk management is an integral element of corporate governance following a number of corporate scandals and a terrorist attack such as 9/11 that led to the loss of entire teams. However, early research has found that human capital development risk is not yet a vital consideration for many organisations. Not managing human capital development risk may be material, but due to the novelty and complexity of the concept, not widely researched and there is definite scope for future investigation.

Making informed management decisions about the costs and benefits of human capital development and the resultant risk of failing of such a calculation, may have further reaching consequences than merely meeting compliance requirements. As western multinationals are exploring new corners of the earth as investment targets, they are attracted by the quality of the country's human capital. A country failing to attract FDI due to inefficient levels of HCD may lose out on such investments, and eventually find its sustainability under threat.
