ATD has completed its very first talent development snapshot for Canada! This detailed report, Canada: Talent Development Snapshot, 2015, is free for a limited time and brings you key insights into budgets, learning hours, and talent challenges. The report is designed to enable talent development professionals in Canada or those from global organizations with operations in Canada to benchmark their talent development activities against those of their peers. 

To reach more professionals in Canada, ATD collaborated with the Institute for Performance and Learning, who translated the survey into French and distributed it to their contacts. More than 300 talent development professionals responded to the survey, representing small organizations (fewer than 500 employees), medium organizations (500 to 9,999 employees), and large organizations (10,000 or more employees) in Canada. The top industries were education, finance and insurance, other services (nongovernment), and public administration (government). 

Key Findings 

Talent development professionals in Canada indicated that the most important trending topic is linking learning to performance improvement. This is on par with the interests of talent development professionals around the world. If you are wondering how to make this connection, you are not alone; the challenge for talent development professionals globally will be to identify a clear strategy to connect their training programs to changes in the workforce and in the bottom line of the business as a whole. 

The Canada snapshot also discovered the top content areas that talent development professionals focused on. Can you guess what they were? Business processes and procedures ranked high, but a longer list of top areas can be found on page 5 of the report. 

Talent Development Budget and Organization Size 

Wondering if you are spending too much on talent development? It all depends on the size of your organization’s workforce. At one end of the spectrum, 40 percent of small organizations with fewer than 500 workers spend less than $10,000, while 29 percent of large organizations with 10,000 or more employees spend at least $10 million! However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that large companies spend more on a per-employee basis. In fact, ATD Research found that there are economies of scale in learning. A large company often spends less per employee to offer the same material than a smaller company, because the large company can spread the cost of a class or program over more attendees. An organization’s total spending is typically divided among outsourced activities, internal costs, and tuition reimbursement. Which activity do you think organizations spent the most money on? What do you spend the most on? Check out page 11 of the report for graphs illustrating spending by organization size as well as the breakdown of this spending. How Does Your Organization Compare? Canada: Talent Development Snapshot, 2015, provides talent development professionals with data to benchmark their organizations’ talent activities. Do not aim to replicate the numbers; instead, use them to better understand how your organization compares with others. This report is free for a limited time. Grab your copy today for complete access to the key findings, recommendations, statistics, and graphs.