In June, I wrote a blog about the importance of participating in the State of the Industry and the value of the data published. I am excited now, six months later, to write about the results of the survey. In total, 340 organizations’ data is included in the final report. We greatly appreciate the time and effort of these organizations to provide their data.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was hoping we would have enough participation this year to focus on segments of the data, as well as the overall findings. I am excited to present the final product, which includes data by organization size and industry in addition to the consolidated data.

The average direct learning expenditure per employee for the consolidated group of participants in 2013 was $1,208. This is a one percent ($13) increase over 2012. The number of learning hours used per employee also slightly increased to 31.5 hours from 30.3 hours. This is great for the industry as a whole as we can see the industry is stable and organizations continue to invest in training.

However, many factors influence an organization’s training programs. Size and industry are certainly one of these factors. This year we focused a bit more in the analysis on size and industry. Examining the 340 participants we found nearly a quarter were large organizations with over 10,000 employees, 38 percent are midsize with 500 to 9,999 employees, and the remaining 38 percent were small organizations with less than 500 employees.

When we examined direct learning expenditure by employee for each of these subgroups, we found small organizations with less than 500 employees spent on average $802 per employee, whereas midsize and large organizations spent $838 per employee.

Digging in a little deeper, we also found that while midsize and large organization reported the same direct expenditure per employee what they offered wasn’t quite the same. The average number of learning hours used by an employee at a large organization was 36 compared to just 27 for a midsize organization.  So this means that a large organization was able to provide an extra day of training (nine hours) compared to midsize organizations at the same expenditure per employee. 

In the full State of the Industry report, which is available as a free PDF to all ATD members, we examine more benchmarking statistics, such as learning hours used per employee, expenditure distribution (internal, external, and tuition reimbursement), employees per learning staff member, and the cost per learning hour used, to name a few.

I encourage everyone to review the report and use the data to benchmark your organization. Take the time to read the analysis and tables and to understand how organization size and industry influences the data.  For some quick stats, you can take a look at the State of the Industry infographic.

To further understand the data and hear more about how we analyzed the data, join me for a webcast on December 18 at noon. I will talk about the data and take questions from participants.