The efficiency of investment in human capital in IT enterprises

Abstract

Abstract The paper presents some of the results of the research with the orientation on human capital and its efficiency. Human capital, as the sum of intangible qualities and features such as knowledge, skills, abilities, attitudes and talent, represents an essential resource for the value creation, mainly within the field of knowledge-intensive industries. This is, for example, the case of the enterprises conducting business in the environment of information technology, more specifically, the enterprises creating software products or providing the services related. Within this paper, the broad topic of human capital is approached from the perspective of investment in this intangible asset. The attention is paid to the forms and focus of investment efforts of enterprises. An important question is whether these efforts are in alignment with what is considered to be the most important in the present, rapidly-changing environment. Proper investment in human capital is necessary for the enterprise to become flexible enough to be able to adapt to new, emerging trends. However, when investing in the human capital available, enterprises need to deal with the efficiency of this activity as well. Therefore, they need proper ways of evaluating whether the investment was efficient. The paper presents suggestions for the solution of this matter, based on the opinions of academics, other researchers and especially the practitioners – the managers of enterprises. The investment in human capital needs to be connected to the metrics and indicators suitably representing the performance and the competitiveness of enterprises. The methods for the evaluation of the efficiency of investment in human capital must be specific enough to capture the essence of this asset but, at the same time, they need to be applicable for the operation of enterprises and for their managerial processes. The characteristic features of such investment cannot be omitted since they affect the substantial parts of the whole evaluation. For example, there is a significant imminent risk of losing an employee who was the target of valuable investment in his/her human capital when he/she decides to leave the enterprise. This underpins the purpose of research within the field of efficiency of investment in human capital as one of the core issues of the concept denoted as human capital management. The aim of this paper is to reveal the current situation of the process of investment in human capital being performed in IT enterprises operating in the Slovak Republic. These enterprises with their solutions have an important role in the sector of transport as well, as it is described in the paper. Two groups of data were used. The primary data were represented by the answers of human resources managers to the questions in the survey. This questionnaire survey was conducted in 2018, focusing on IT enterprises operating in the Slovak Republic. The enterprises were addressed directly, on a random basis. There were 115 IT enterprises participating in this research. The secondary data represented the opinions of software developers working in the Slovak Republic, collected by a professional organization in 2018. There were 617 respondents answering the questions. The methods of statistical description and analysis of the data included the frequencies of individual answers with their total percentages and the χ2 test applied to identify possible associative relationship between the sets of categorical data entries.