Firms are putting more value on – and cash into – management courses, a new report claims.

Cambridge Online Learning’s (COL) 2003 Annual Training Survey showed a 100% increase in the awareness of the importance of management training.

While COL said that management training was still suffering the effects of recession, of the 250 training buyers surveyed, 18% – compared with 9% last year – stated an ‘increase in awareness’ as the key reason for increased management training spend in 2003.

It found that greater emphasis is now being placed on improved individual performance rather than measuring the bottom line as a method of evaluating training effectiveness. Management appraisal systems were cited by 91% of training buyers as the most common means of evaluation, up 4% from last year, and only 14% stated measuring the increase in profit as a method of evaluation, down from 22% last year. However, just over 5% of organisations admitted to not measuring the effectiveness of training spend at all.

While wastage of training budgets due to non-completion of courses went down – with 31% reporting no wastage compared to just 18% in 2002, 80% of public sector organisations admitted to wasting up to half of their training budgets on business course drop-outs.

Figures from the CIPD Training and Development Survey 2003 revealed that a quarter of public sector training buyers had seen their budgets increase this year.

The survey also showed a growing need for flexible management training with the number one reason companies said they avoided putting employees on long-term training courses was that they couldn’t spare people.