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Training Topics
and
Business Climate Survey

We conducted an important industry study of training and HR management professionals in the December issue of WorkplaceXpert newsletter and a subsequent broadcast invitation to 8,000 plus subscribers.

We consider it very important to provide our readers with an opportunity to express their opinions on what topics are most importance and interest to them. We also look to readers to provide some insight on how their outlook on a variety of topics.

Doing more with less is a common theme for the training and HR leaders who responded to the survey. Time, budget and staff are precious and limited resources according to readers. It would seem that we are all being stretched to the limit.

Overall though, respondents have expectations for profitable times are ahead. This will result from an increase in productivity, supported by training effectiveness delivered by improved technology investments and increases in blended learning solutions.

Two readers’ responses to the question, “What is your greatest challenge?” sum it up well.

”Our need for training will outstrip the capacity of the trainers to provide it. In addition, the trainers are mostly 'borrowed' SMEs {Subject Matter Experts} so our design/delivery capabilities are not optimal. This could be fixed with an infusion of money, but we're being told to make do.”

”Budget cuts reduce the amount of travel allowed for students to attend classes. Live virtual classroom seems a natural solution but technology is holding us back for our hands-on technical lab-based training.”

Who Responded?

We heard from a great cross-section of readers, from a number of industries, company sizes and professional titles.

Professional Title:

• 62% of respondents are directly responsible for Training,
  or HR/Training management
• 15% were in an education or government setting
• 12% are responsible for corporate or administration management
• 7% were affiliated with a training industry supplier

How many employees are there in your organization?:

• More than a half (52%) of all respondents are in large organizations (more than 1000 employees)
• 28% are from mid-sized companies
• 20% are from companies with 100 employees or less
  

Business Climate

We wanted to provide readers with a benchmark for how their 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 there is a significant amount of pessimism for the overall economy for the coming year.

• The greatest optimism is for readers’ outlook for their own career (54% are optimistic). 19% are pessimistic about the 2006 prospects for their career.
• 25% of respondents are optimistic about the prospects for the overall economy. 44% indicated concern for the economy for the coming year.

How do you think these figures compare to how readers responded to the same question last year? Well, there were similarities, especially with the trend favoring their own careers and company outlooks being more optimistic. However, readers are much more pessimistic this year from last about broader issues.

• Readers are practically equal in terms of optimism about their own careers this coming year as last (54% 2006 vs. 56% 2005).
• Readers are less optimistic about prospects for their company/organization this year than last (50% 2006 vs. 62% in 2005)
• 43% are optimistic about their industry/sector this year, whereas 60% were optimistic in 2005.
• And this year, readers are much less optimistic about the overall economy as a whole (25%) vs. 41% in 2005.

Reader 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 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 these anticipated expenditures have been deferred the past few years, or perhaps they are investment intentions based on individual organization expansion plans, but respondents will be enjoying an increase in investment in several areas.

These “winners” include: E-learning initiatives (63%); Technology investments (59%); Custom training materials/manuals development (53%); Classroom training initiatives (52%); Company salaries (45%) and Overall profitability of organization (43%)

• 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 travel expenditures, IT investments, training department headcounts/staffing, presentation equipment purchases to remain unchanged.
• About a quarter of respondents are anticipating decreases in outside training investment (26%); attendance at outside conferences/seminars (24%); purchase of off-the shelf training materials (22%).
  

The corporate related initiatives were:

The training specific initiatives were:

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. In fact, of the 20 topics presented, 16 earned interest scores of more than 80%.The "top rated" areas of information were:

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

These first 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.”