Swanson’s (1995) definition of HRD was “a process of developing and/or unleashing human expertise through organization development and personnel training and development for the purpose of improving performance” (p. 208). Swanson (2001) also argued that the three critical application areas of the HRD discipline are human resource management, career development, and quality improvement. In the UK, according to McGoldrick, Stewart, and Watson (2001c), the process of defining HRD by researchers and practitioners has been frustrating, elusive, and confusing; it is apparently lacking boundaries and parameters and is like a child of the explosion of HRM literature in the 1980s and 1990s