One of my favourite industry studies to read is Training Magazines ‘state of the industry’ report that comes out each year. It’s great because you can track back over decades of the same questions being asked to extract key trends. Just search:
‘[YEAR] training industry report’
to get the relevant PDF, like so:
One stat that I often look for is ‘how much training is being done online vs face-to-face’ in large organisations. Back in 2015, some 37% of all large company training was delivered ‘in-classroom’. Fast forward to 2019 and that figure was basically unchanged at 36%.
Of course, the pandemic changed this radically and in 2022 the figure for pure classroom training had shrunk to 16%. In the latest 2023 numbers it had moved back up to 21% – but still, nearly a drop of half on what was being done in the classroom pre-pandemic.
According to the survey, a lot more training was delivered by comparison in 2023; 48 hours per employee, compared with just 39 hours in 2019.
The cost advantages to moving online look to be vast. In 2019 an hour of training cost $39. But in 2023, an hour of training cost just $10.
This is an astonishing efficiency gain.
Perhaps too astonishing… in 2022, the same figure was $36 – budgets for training in 2022 shot up to $1,689 per employee, before crashing in 2023 to $481.
That’s worth another blog post on its own because, if it’s real, it means an unprecedented fall in training expenditure per employee occurred in 2023.
But whether or not that particular statistic can be relied upon, what is clear to me is that we’ve entered into the age of pragmatic learning.
A massive increase in demand, coupled with a real-terms decrease in budgets, means that training departments everywhere have got to get real about how and where they spend their money to deliver the best bang for the buck.