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Learning in Tough Economic Times: How Corporate Learning is Meeting the Challenge
ASTD - American Society for Training and Development, Aug 2009, Pages: 65
The global recession weighs heavily on everyone’s mind. Few industries are immune to the down economy, but some companies are weathering this storm because they understand the value of having skilled talent to grow the organization. The learning function is critically important to helping an organization achieve a competitive advantage in a troubled economy.
ASTD’s “Learning in Tough Economic Times” presents compelling information on best practices organizations are using to cope with financial uncertainty. This study provides real data, ideas, and tools that you can implement to be a strategic business partner and help position your organization for success in the recovery. This research even looks to the future of learning as executives describe how the current recession will shape their learning functions in coming years.
The study shows that recent economic times have been uniquely challenging. Although the definition of the “last downturn” was left to the experience of individual respondents, when asked to compare the severity of the downturn in 2008 with past economic dips, three-quarters of respondents indicated the current downturn is more challenging: 38 percent of survey participants said this one was much more challenging than past downturns, and nearly four in 10 labelled the current downturn as somewhat more challenging.
The Impact on Learning
Most organizations have felt a significant impact from the down economy. As of January 2009, corporate profits had fallen for seven quarters, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Bloomberg reports, “Should earnings drop through the first half of 2009, as analysts surveyed by Bloomberg project, it will be the longest stretch of decreases since the government started tracking quarterly data in 1947.”
Not surprisingly, organizations place increasing pressure on their various business functions - including learning - to closely manage costs. Accordingly, four in 10 respondents in the study said that, to a high or very high degree, there was a reduction in resources to support learning.
In addition, the analysis indicates that a reduction of resources was correlated with lower effectiveness of learning programs and with lower levels of performance on the study’s market performance index.
With the global economy in a downward spiral, it is difficult to find individuals or organizations that do not feel the effects in some fashion. Nonetheless, more than half of respondents said they feel their learning programs are actually more effective today than they were two years ago. A little over a quarter of respondents said that, to a high or very high extent, their learning function’s ability to meet organizational learning needs has suffered in the current downturn.
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