Employee training and development (T&D) in business and industry, as a critical function of human resource development, must reflect a whole-health, proactive orientation in helping today's organizations survive in an increasingly competitive market. A proactive T&D orientation is based on humanistic views of work and education and is reflected in critical T&D practices such as content selection, participant selection, learning activity design, and program evaluation. Contrary to the notion that labor is a commodity to be traded for maximum return, the humanistic conception of work is that it has intrinsic value to the human being. The humanistic view of education is that the richest and most challenging environments should be provided, so that individuals can achieve the maximum use of their talents. These conceptions of education and work have two critical implications for the nature of T&D functions: what is trained and how. Proactive T & D not only improves individuals' technical skills but also satisfies their aspirations for personal growth. Proactive training is based on methods that are holistic (instead of presentation in small broken steps), relevant to the individual (instead of blanket training requirements imposed on all employees), and challenging (building on errors instead of minimizing chances for mistakes). Proactive T&D is built upon an organization's commitment to using it as a strategic plan to achieve long-range goals. (19 references) (Author/KC)