Over the past twelve months much of the UK economy has been hit, to a greater or lesser degree, by the downturn of the global economy. Budgets have been slashed, people laid off and companies have had to re-appraise (cut back?) on their training plans. Like many other companies Call of the Wild has also had to carefully look at its business models and client base to see how we can come out of the recession as a leading player in the management training industry.
To this end, during the third quarter of 2009 the directors of Call of the Wild held a series of executive meetings to discuss budgeting for 2010 and to try and anticipate what effect the current worldwide financial crisis may have on the training and development plans of our clients. One of the outcomes of these meetings was to ask our clients directly what their plans, in terms of training, were for 2010.
We came up with a short customer survey which included four of the following questions. The responses are included after the question.
1. Has the current recession had an impact on your learning and development budget for 2009?
78.7 % of respondents thought that the recession had a negative effect on L&D budgets
2. Has the current recession had an impact on your learning and development budget for 2010?
60.5 % of respondents thought that the recession had a negative effect on L&D budgets
3. What areas of learning and development will you be focusing on in 2010?
42% of respondents thought that leadership development should be the focus and 60% of respondents thought that team development should be the focus
4. What areas of learning and development do you see as essential to focus on post-recession?
51.1% of respondents thought that leadership development should be the focus and 81.1% of respondents thought that team development should be the focus
5. Which delivery methods are you considering using in 2010?
63.6% of respondents said that they would be considering Workshop/Programme on site and 54.5% said they would consider E-learning.
The response rate was considerably higher than expected with 17.4% of those e-mailed replying. The results of the survey illustrated that the crisis has had indeed had an overall detrimental effect on L&D budgets for 2009 and 2010. However it was extremely encouraging to see that the large majority of respondents thought that the main areas of focus for L&D for 2010 and post recession should be Leadership and Team Development.What is obvious is that our clients see that great leadership and teamwork is even more important in the current financial climate, where more needs to be done with less resource. It appears that they are using the current situation as an opportunity to think carefully about what areas of L&D are really important to their organisations.
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