cbi employment trends survey

Gemma Middleton, Communications Specialist, discusses the implications of the findings within the CBI, Fit for Business report for the Learning and Development market.

The skills level of Britain has become something of a regular thing in the press, with the subject gaining more emphasis since the Leitch Review of Skills earlier this year. This month the main political parties have said that nearly half of pupils at primary schools are leaving without the required level of academic attainment. Channel 4 are also generating awareness of this growing problem by creating a childhood literacy season that is promoted by celebrities to try to bring the message home. This is a scary prospect for all areas of business as the skills gap between the UK and other countries widens.

The CBI report had many key findings that proved for some interesting reading. Firstly, organisations see training as a priority as they want to address the lack of skills in their workforce. It stated that organisations do not mind investing in their people, however, they do feel it is not their place or acceptable to train basic development skills that should have been attained while at school. Other than basic needs, the top training requirements identified were for a higher level of skills, with a strong focus on people management and leadership.

HR specialists have known for years that an organisation’s skills and knowledge levels have a direct impact on how economically effective they are and it seems that the rest of the business world have also put the two together. As a result, training within organisations has had a strong emphasis placed on it, which will have a large, positive impact in many HR departments. For years, HR departments have had to struggle in getting the go ahead for development initiatives due to the overall cost to the organisation. That problem seems to be outdated and HR departments now find that one of the best methods to design and implement development initiatives is by using external learning and development specialists. In fact, 91% of survey respondents who use external suppliers prefer private learning and development specialists because they rate the following aspects higher compared with other providers, such as universities and government initiatives:

Relevance of training
Delivery
Quality
Location
Overall level of responsiveness to training requirements

Two thirds of development programmes are not recognised qualifications, which supports the move towards external development specialists creating bespoke initiatives. This is because many organisations see development initiatives developed specifically for their organisation as more effective compared with general qualification training.

Overall, this is great news for the UK economy, development is vital to success and it doesn’t matter which method is chosen the fact that training is now a priority can only bring huge benefits to employees, HR departments and all UK organisations.