7 February 2008
Spending on workplace training is falling despite the government and EU incentives to boost employment skills with the gap in investment between smaller firms and larger organisations getting wider.
These are among the key findings of the latest national study of learning and development (L&D) practices in Ireland. Average spending, as a percentage of total payroll costs, has declined from 3.85% (2001) to 3.55% (2003) to 3.13% last year (2007).
The drop in training and learning initiatives, measured by training days, was most noticeable for supervisors, senior managers and professional staff according to the joint research by the University of Limerick’s Kemmy Business School and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in Ireland (CIPD-Ireland).
Details of the study of 500 companies and over 1,000 employees, released this weekend, indicate that multinational companies continue to lead in staff training with expenditure of just over 4% of total employee costs but still slightly below the EU average of 4.15%.
For the past 15 years Irish companies have lagged well behind most western European states when it comes to employee development and the gap between those employing more than 500 people compared with companies with fewer than 250 continues to widen.
Michael McDonnell, director of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in Ireland (CIPD-Ireland), said: ‘This joint research clearly shows that organisations with more than 500 employees generally operate at a high level and many have sophisticated employee development programmes. Unfortunately, we continue to see very low training commitment in those companies with fewer than 250 staff while, in the middle 250-500 segment, training commitment is solid but practices can be varied.’
According to the research team leader, Professor Tom Garavan of Limerick University: ‘Gender, age, contractual status and country of origin are significant factors in determining who secures access to employment-related training.’
‘Clearly an immigrant worker, those on short-term contracts, women and men over 50, all lose out proportionately when is comes to accessing training and development opportunities’, he added.
CIPD members can read a summary of the key findings by following the link below.