How effective are professional development activities for R&D engineers?

Despite the many claims by scholars and managers regarding the importance of professional development activities to organizations, few studies have examined the effectiveness of such activities. Using data from 498 engineers of an R&D organization of a large information technology company, we explore the effect of six professional development activities (attending conferences, reading trade publications, conducting stretch assignments, making customer contacts, taking short courses, and taking university courses) on the assessment of the employee's relative contribution to the organization's success. Results reveal that only making customer contacts and attending conferences are positively related to the engineers' relative contributions to the organization's success, while the other activities are not related. Implications of these surprising results are discussed for both academics and practitioners.