d attain competitive advantages within their competitive environment (Porter, 1980): Cost reduction, in which the company seeks to position itself by practicing the lowest cost in the competitive environment, which may imply the offering of goods and/or services with the lowest prices in its market. Differentiation, which aims at offering differentiated goods and/or services generally to niches of a market. A price policy with a greater unitary profit margin could be practiced. Focus, which selects one or more segments of the company’s markets and tries to develop competitive advantages (focusing on one of the two previous strategies). As these advantages are focused on a few segments of the market, no general competitive advantage is attained.Competitive advantage is commonly defined as a position attained by a business unit and perceived by its customers when it is compared with its competitors. They may be characterised as lower cost or differentiation (Porter, 1980).Both manufacturing and human resource strategies support the development of a competitive or business unit strategy. Based on the definition of corporate and competitive strategies, it is possible to start the formulation of its manufacturing strategy and the choice of its competitive priorities as well. In this way, there is a natural alignment of competitive strategies with competitive priorities of manufacturing strategy 8:0Self Development And How It Is Aligned With The HRM Strategic ObjectivesSelf-development is the term used to denote both 'of self' and 'by self' types of learning (Pedler, 1988).People developing themselves take responsibility for their own learning and identify their own learning needs and how to meet them, often through the performance of everyday work, monitor their own progress, assess the outcomes and reassess their goals. The role of others in self-development is not to teach or to train, but perhaps to c...
