Organizations continued to make healthy investments in employee learning in 2016, finds the Association for Talent Development’s 2017 State of the Industry report, which is sponsored by LinkedIn Learning and Study.com. Organizations spent $1,273 per employee in 2016 on direct learning expenditure, compared with $1,252 in 2015.

Confirming organizations’ commitment to learning, the average number of formal learning hours used per employee also grew, reaching 34.1 hours in 2016, up from 33.5 hours in 2015. In fact, this is the fourth year in a row that has seen an increase in both the direct learning expenditure and the number of learning hours per employee.