Survey of Learning & Development Plans Post Recession

During the third quarter of 2009 the directors of Call of the Wild were whiling away their valuable time discussing what effect the current worldwide financial crisis has had on the training and development plans of our clients. After much speculation around where the spending focus of a reduced L&D budget should be, a flash of inspiration came to us. Instead of speculating, why not ask our clients what their plans are?

We came up with a short customer survey containing the following four questions:

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

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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