New research data from TalentLMS and SHRM indicates that companies will invest even more money in learning and development this year. As the pandemic enters its third year and amidst a deepening skills gap, leaders are turning to L&D teams to become a catalyst in smoothing the transition to a digital workplace. The survey pulsed employer and employee perspectives on their upcoming L&D budgets, the key in-demand skills and the training desires of employees versus what employers offer.
The results indicate that over two-thirds of HR Managers agree that their L&D budgets will increase in the coming year whilst over half of HR leaders will provide their employees with upskilling and reskilling training in 2022. The majority of HR professionals indicated that their average L&D budget is between USD $500 – 3,000 (57%) though 15% reported that their organisations had set aside more than USD $5,000 per employee for training and development purposes.
Despite seeing investment, more than half of HR professionals surveyed agreed that organisational leadership teams often see L&D as a cost rather than an investment versus 85% of HR leaders who believe it to be beneficial to their organisation. This clearly indicates that there is still hesitation and roadblocks from leadership teams that HR will need to successfully persuade to secure additional L&D investment.
Growing gap
To meet the widening skills gap, many businesses are turning to upskilling and reskilling their staff to build new competencies amongst their employees. Unsurprisingly, 86% of HR leaders agreed that closing the skills gap is an important training objective and in order to achieve it, are establishing a variety of initiatives and different types of training.
As for meeting training expectations, both employees and employers were reportedly in sync with employees prioritising hard skills whilst employers were seemingly more focused on self-management skills. As for soft-skills, collaboration, teamwork, leadership, adaptability and creativity were reported as the most in-demand by employees and 76% of organisations will be offering training in these areas in the coming year.
When polled on how their employers could look to improve their training programmes, employees voiced that leaders could align the training with job responsibilities, update training content more frequently as well as making training more social in order to increase training effectiveness.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
