How are learning and development budgets fairing at the moment?

L&D spend in Q4 08 

In Driving Business Benefits, we looked at spending expectations of participants over a 3 month period.

For data collected in October and November we saw that 25% of participants expected to see a decrease in training budget (and 25% expected an increase). When we repeated the question in December 08,  we found that 40% of participating organisations expected their overall training budget to decrease (and 15% expected it to increase.)

However we also saw that the overall expectation of e-learning spend as a proportion of training budgets was much more positive with 50% of respondents expecting the proportion of their budget spent on e-learning to increase and only 12% expecting it to decrease.(December data)

L&D spend in Q4 09 

However we are in volatile times so it is interesting to compares the UK findings to research from the Masie Centre released this week from their first survey of learning resources and spending taken in late March 09.  Their data is based on 532 organisations around the world and highlights that

• 12% of overall budgets have increased, 25% has stayed the same and 61% have decreased
• The spend on external services is decreasing (in 60% of organisations)
• Volume of face to face courses has decreased (in 50% of organisations)
• Volume of virtual webinars, e-learning courses has increased ( in 51% of organisations)
• Employee travel time for learning has decreased in 79% of organisations

Interestingly they also found that in the last 3 months, 45% of organisations have done more with less and 30% have delivered the same but with fewer resources. In Q4 last year, 56% of our respondents in the UK believed that the credit crunch was an opportunity to do more with what they had.

77% of the organisations in the Masie Centre survey were from the US but their findings mirror the trends of the UK identified a few months earlier and highlights the global concerns and opportunities within Learning and Development today.

To find out more about the Masie Centre Barometer study go to http://www.masie.com/barometer

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