UK
businesses are wasting up to 20 per cent of their training budgets due to
employees failing to attend designated business courses, a survey finds.
The
research by learning innovator Cambridge Online Learning (COL) of 250 buyers of
training in the UK, revealed a number of surprises for training buyers and providers
alike.
Over
half of those organisations which calculated wastage admitted to combined
losses totalling between £217m and £871m per year, while only a fifth claim
they suffer no financial loss from lack of training attendance.
Other
survey findings show:
–
UK management training is still in its infancy, with a quarter of all
respondents spending their budgets on developing technical competencies and
less than 10 per cent dedicating a substantial amount of budget (50 per cent+)
to management development.
–
Yet key motivators for business managers who buy in training appear to be
improved efficiency (86 per cent), business impact (73 per cent) and personal
development (73 per cent).
–
Key reasons for not buying in training included expense (68 per cent), lack of
business benefits (37 per cent) and irrelevance to the employee’s role (37 per
cent).
–
Three-quarters of the respondents are in agreement that spending on developing
employees into better people managers is too limited.
–
However, there appears to be a distinct lack of objective setting by training
buyers with a third admitting they are unsure of what their training programmes
are actually designed to deliver.
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–
The deteriorating economic outlook has had minimal impact on training budgets
with three-quarters of respondents having the same/higher training budgets this
year than in 2001.
