Your participation is very valuable to us at WorkplaceXpert. Your input helps us understand the types of information our readers value and want to see in each issue.

As always, feel free to let me know contact me with any rants, raves, comments or suggestions. Thanks for your interest and support of WorkplaceXpert!

John Quincy, Editor

By the way, if you would like to see the results of the previous surveys, check out the links below:

Training Department and Initatives (2002)

Business Climate Survey (2002)

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How is it Going for You This Year?Survey Results

We conducted an important industry study of training and HR management professionals in the May issue of WorkplaceXpert newsletter and a subsequent broadcast invitation to 7000 plus subscribers. The survey, How is it Going for You This Year? was a follow-up of two surveys we conducted last year - the first being a survey on topics and subject areas of interest to training professionals and the second being a business climate study.

We considered it important to provide our readers with an opportunity to update their ideas and responses for these two important subject areas for training and HR professionals in organizations across North America, but also as a way to measure how our collective impressions and plans may have changed. There were a lot of dynamics at work in the world the past year - increased homeland security issues, changing government mandates, an economy in recession, rising unemployment, not to mention a War. As we turn the corner on the year, and begin to see signs of recovery - learning how our readers feel about their business climate seemed an important and useful project that would be enlightening to our readers.

All that being said, here is what we learned:

Who Answered:

We heard from a great cross-section of readers, from a number of industries, company sizes and professional titles. A whopping 92% are involved directly in training or HR management. About 7% were affiliated with a training industry supplier. About 16% were in an education or government setting.

What you do:



How many employees are there in your organization?:

Business Climate:

We wanted to provide you with a benchmark for how your peers felt about the prospects for their own careers, their company’s outlook, their industry and the overall economy. Overall, readers are more optimistic than pessimistic about the outlook for the business climate, though no one seems to be bouncing up and down for joy.

The chart below illustrates how readers responded to these questions in May of 2003.



How do you think these figures compare when we asked readers the same questions, 7 months earlier in October of 2002?

Well, there were a lot of similarities, but some interesting shifts worth noting. Clearly, readers are more optimistic about their own careers this coming year than last (68% vs. 56%) and prospects for their company/organization (70% vs. 62%) in May of this year, as opposed to October of 2002. But, they are slightly less optimistic about their industry/sector (59% vs. 60%) then they were last year and less optimistic about the overall economy as a whole (37% vs. 41%).

Your Expectations:

Expectations, like one’s perceptions, have a way of becoming one’s reality – at least in the short term. This fact is especially true when you ask executives who have direct responsibility for their organization’s human resources management and professional development planning and execution. Readers of WorkplaceXpert newsletter took the time to respond in detail about their personal expectations for their organization for a number of different categories, as well as provide their expectations and plans for investments to support their organization’s training initiatives.

We asked readers to provide their best guess on what would happen in the next twelve months on a number of fronts. Would things increase, stay the same or decrease? We even provided readers an opportunity to designate those changes in terms of significant or moderate increases/decreases as defined by +/- 1-5% or more than 5%. For ease of presentation, we have grouped the decrease and increase categories together.

• Increased investments are planned  by a number of respondents to the survey in areas that represent big ticket purchases in our industry. Perhaps they were deferred in the past couple of years, or perhaps they are investment intentions based on individual organization expansion plans, but more than one-third of respondents will be enjoying an increase in investment in several areas.

These “winners” include: E-learning initiatives (53%); Custom training materials/manuals development (51%); Classroom training initiatives (50%); Technology investments (45%); Overall profitability of organization (39%); and Company salaries (35%)

• Many investment categories are planning to remain unchanged for the most part. Of note is the fact that more than half of respondents are expecting salaries, department headcounts/staffing, presentation equipment purchases to remain unchanged.
• More than 25% of respondents are anticipating decreases in travel expenditures; attendance at outside conferences/seminars; outside training investment; purchase of off-the shelf training materials and overall staffing/headcount. The most significant decrease will be in the area of travel expenditures, with 44% saying it would drop, and 16% of those saying significant decreases are expected.

The corporate related initiatives were:

               DECREASE       NO CHANGE       INCREASE        N/A
Company salaries
                       9%                      51%                35%             5%
Overall profitability
                     16%                      26%                 39%           20%
Overall staff headcount
                     26%                      45%                 28%             2%
Overall travel expenditures
                     44%                      36%                 17%             3%
Technology investments
                     17%                      32%                  45%             5%

The training specific initiatives were:

Classroom training initiatives
                     18%                       29%                  50%             1%
Custom training materials/manuals development
                     14%                       31%                  51%             3%
E-learning initiatives
                     11%                       29%                  53%             8%
IT training budget
                     18%                       48%                  22%           12%
Off-the-shelf training materials/videos, etc purchase
                     31%                       43%                  23%             3%
Outside training/consultants investment
                     38%                       44%                  16%             2%
Training Department staff headcount
                     16%                       61%                  18%             5%
Overall attendance at non-company sponsored conferences
                     38%                       44%                  16%             2%

Based on this input, one could conclude that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

As we try to overlay and compare these responses to the May survey with those collected in our 2002 version, we see that expectations for the next 12 months are not as bleak as was reported for 2002. This may mean, for many in our industry, that we have touched the bottom and are looking for things to stabilize for 2003 and begin a cautious recovery. These findings are supported by readers’ improved optimism for their organization’s performance expectations.

The shift has been from the “Decrease” response options to the “No Change” response option. Remarkably, those providing moderate and significant increases seem to mirror 2002 responses. The deepest cuts, budget reductions, staff reductions were reported in 2002. These translate to 2003 expectations as No Change. We can therefore hypothesize that the next 12 months will be a time of maintenance, with some differed investments from last year being considered or finally made.

Training Related Topics and Subjects of Interest:

WorkplaceXpert readers have diverse interests and informational needs. We asked how readers rated their interest on a number of specific topics of interest to trainers and HR management professionals. The responses were grouped and reported together as below.

In general, a vast majority of readers had at least some interest in all of the topics. The five "top rated" areas of information were:

             Leadership/Management Training information
             Training assessments and Evaluation
             Content/Instructional Design
             Presentation Skills
             ROI/Measurement/Training effectiveness

The topics of lowest interest, based on survey responses and noted in the chart below by the "blue" portion of each row were:

             Sales Training
             HR Administration

These two topics received the lowest ratings partially because these topics appear to be outside the purview of the majority of the respondents. As the below illustrates, all the topics had significant interest, as noted by the "yellow" representing "very important ratings" and the maroon portion, representing "some interest."