Righttrack Press Release

Quality Number 1 in Learning and Development

The fundamental rule of business is to deliver products / services that customers want, and at a price they can afford. This means that many criteria are negotiable and in many instances that includes quality.

One organisation that takes understanding their customers and their industry seriously is Righttrack Consultancy, the learning and development specialists. They have just completed their sixth annual satisfaction survey, which researches into training managers and HR professionals’ views on learning and development. It aims to gain a greater understanding of what is seen as important when buying training.

The survey requires participants to rate a list of 20 criteria on a Lo-Hi scale of 1 to 5. Quality was scored as the top criterion for the first time.

The top 5 criteria viewed by respondents as imperative, when purchasing training from external providers, are shown below.

The quality of learning and development, the proposals match to requirements and the capability of the provider, have all remained within the top 3 for the third year running, showing how fundamentally important these factors are to training buyers. Interestingly one of the biggest movers was the level of importance placed on the trainers’ experience, which moved from 8th to 4th and it is the first time it has ever been in the top 5, further highlighting the emphasis on quality.

Chris Banting, Righttrack’s International Marketing and Business Development Manager said, “When times get tough a general misconception is that you should slash your prices and therefore costs, this inevitably impacts on quality; after all, to sustain lower prices something needs to give.”

But as the results of the survey show, quality, capability and matching the solution to learning requirements, are viewed as the most important aspects when considering investing in training. This has been the case for the last 3 years and looks set to continue.

It is reassuring to see that with something as important as training, quality remains more important than price, even in the current climate. At Righttrack we believe that this is how it should be, as investing in low cost, low quality training is a false economy; cheap training rarely produces worthwhile improvements in a business.”

The main message the survey communicates to learning and development providers is that quality is crucial. Cost cutting, resulting in a reduction in quality, may seem like an attractive short-term plan however, when customers cite quality as the No. 1 selection criterion, those that sacrifice it to cut costs do so at their peril.

Download our 2009 Satisfaction Survey Results for more information.

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