The majority of employers that turned to informal training methods as a means of cutting learning and development costs have found that they are just as, if not more, effective than more traditional approaches.
According to a study by by XpertHR, two-thirds of the organisations that it questioned have taken steps to prune training expenditure over the last year, with 80% of them turning to informal learning methods such as work-shadowing, secondments and mentoring to do so.
Charlotte Wolff, XpertHR’s training editor and the author of the report, said : "Although L&D budgets have been seriously challenged in the past year by adverse economic circumstances, the effectiveness of training has not necessarily been diminished."
Instead, some 31% of the employers that made cutbacks had actually seen improvements in the effectiveness of their L&D provision, while a further 47% said that it remained the same, she added.
Other common ways of reducing costs were to:
- Use fewer external providers
- Employ social learning techniques
- Collaborate more at a cross-organisational level
- Increase the involvement of managers when delivering training
- Undertake a more rigorous training needs analysis that was aligned with business strategy.
The survey also revealed that the average annual L&D budget per employee was £357, which is only slightly higher than three years ago when it was £334. Over the last year, 32% of employers saw their L&D budgets fall and 38% said that they were frozen.
