More from less: skills needed, but budgets trimmed

When recession hits, what happens to training? Right now, the answer to that question is dramatically different to previous recessions, argues Learning & Development Editor Donald H Taylor.

Western economies have been badly hit over the last 10 months. In previous recessions the sort of downturns we have experienced would have meant just one thing for the training department: immediate, deep cuts, often resulting in training being cancelled wholesale and entire departments laid off. With some exceptions that has not been the picture this time around.

So what is different about the recession of 2009?

Two things are different. First: the value of skills is now recognized. This isn’t rhetoric; labour in developed economies today is mostly skilled and increasingly organisations differentiate themselves through what their people do.

This is backed up by reports such as the UK’s Institute of Directors’ June 2009 survey results Training in the Recession: Winner or Loser? It states:

Compared to other areas of business expenditure included in the survey, training spend has held up best of all under the recessionary pressure of the last six months.

Meanwhile, the Boston Consulting Group’s pan-European survey Creating People Advantage in Times of Crisis of March 2009 states that business executives had found cutting back on training the least effective measure they had taken in dealing with the last downturn in the ’90s.

In other words, skills are recognised as crucial to remaining successful in this recession. There is another difference, however. In this downturn, unlike in previous slumps, there are alternatives to the classroom.

Classroom training is expensive – not only in the cost of facilities, but also in the time of people attending courses, often for days at a time. That is one reason why getting rid of training departments in the past was an easy option – it presented the double saving of the actual costs of the training department and the opportunity cost of the lost time of the people being trained.

Now, though, there is a range of alternatives to training in the classroom. I have spent a great deal of this year talking to practitioners in workplace learning, mostly in the UK. They tell me that their work practices are shifting, driven by one simple factor: a demand from their sponsors to ‘do the same or more with less’. Executives, in other words, want to have their skills cake and to eat it. They have either trimmed training budgets directly or have banned travel for trainees, but they continue to demand that employees maintain the level of skills they need for their work.

The response of learning and development departments has been to shift out of the classroom and provide training and skills resources via other media such as:

• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Intensive one-to-one coaching sessions over the phone
• Quick reference materials – online and printed

Are all of these as effective as classroom training? In some cases probably not. A focused day-long session away from the office is probably the best way of developing soft skills, for example. But for much of the knowledge-based training that we do, shorter, more frequent sessions are ideal. Information is retained longer and there is less impact on the employee’s working day.

Of the four options above, the one experiencing the greatest take up is webinars – live events delivered online. Done well they are engaging, and encourage learning interaction between participants during and after the event itself. Increasingly webinar software is cheap or free to implement, and the only real step-change needed to implement a webinar training programme is in the skills of the trainer and the expectations of the trainees. My experience is that while they can sometimes be done very badly, they are usually done well enough to warrant a place in the L&D department.

The effects of the recession on training are not uniform. Some organisations have been unaffected which others will suffer savage cuts, but generally the picture is of L&D trying to do more with less – and succeeding. The post-recession legacy of this will be fascinating. In this tough period, L&D will be required to try out new tools for learning and these will become an important part of the L&D toolkit. The classroom will not wither away, but after this recession it may no longer be the automatic first choice for training.


As well as being L&D Editor of Corporatetraining.ie, Donald H Taylor is chairman of the Learning and Skills Group, an international group of Learning and Development professionals. He blogs at www.donaldhtaylor.co.uk and can be contacted at donaldt@learningandskillsgroup.com.