Believing that the primary purpose of professional education is to prepare practitioners, the authors consider variables that affect professional practice. Emphasis is the key role and techniques of experiential education for effective transfer of learnig to practice in medicine, law, social work, and management. Other variables that impact cost and quality of services include cost and length of professional education; specialization, selection, and promotion of faculty; role of research; use of paraprofessionals; and assessment of professional education. Conclusions go beyond education, for the four professions discussed in detail, to challenge current objectives and practices in all professional education. The major conclusion is that professional learning for practice needs to be improved and points to the importance of utilizing and developing experiential education as the key learning approach. Other counterproductive effects of current professional education practices identified are: a tendency to consider isolated problems and ignore clients' needs, inadequate continuing graduate professional education, oversupply of professionals in many areas, failure of many professionals to keep up with changing theory and practice, and overly expensive and poor research as the result of using the same institutions for both. Corrective action is suggested in each case.

A persistent difficulty faced by management professionals is the absence of sources providing information about objectives, theory, and current aproaches and practices for management development. The editors address this issue by bringing together outstanding management professionals to provide a comprehensive review of current management development theory and practice. Individual case studies employing in-depth descriptions of particular management training programs are supplemented by theoretical discussions placing the studies in a common context. The result is an integrated overview of the best and most innovative programs and methods available to the human resources professional.

Divided into three principal sections, the volume first focuses on efforts aimed at the development of individual managers and management styles. The papers in Part Two address programs directed toward changing the culture of the organization. Part Three offers examples of programs that are on the cutting edge of management development. Each chapter includes a description of the diagnosed needs and defined objectives, the design and implementation of the program, an analysis of results, and practical implications for other practioners. Throughout, the contributors provide professionals with an integrated source for both new approaches and useful variations on familiar ones.

In this unique work, Hoberman and Mailick analyze the effectiveness of different educational approaches in management development for the transfer of learning to the workplace, placing particular emphasis on the crucial importance of experiential education. In the course of the presentation, they introduce a number of new analytic and integrative concepts including life-bank, synthetic, and natural experiential education. They also provide examples from the literature and the work experience of the authors in teaching and management. Research relating to management development is among the topics discussed, which also include consideration of environmental influences and an analysis of the relevance of educational and use venues for the transfer of learning.

Beginning with the concept of management development, the discussion articulates the role of the manager in management development, the application of learning theory to management development and then details the concept of experiential learning and the authors' LIFE (Learning Inducted From Experience) approach to learning. The authors conclude their study with a statement on the importance of experiential education to the practical development of management expertise. This work will be of interest to those practitioners and scholars involved in management training, human resource development, and management education.

Contributing Authors Include Edward C. Banfield, William R. Dill, William J. Gore, William V. Haney, And Others.