Mountain View, Calif. — March 15
Expertus, a provider of strategic training outsourcing services, and TrainingOutsourcing.com, a company that offers guidance and consulting to buyers and sellers of outsourcing services, have announced the results of the fifth of six surveys designed to provide market data on all aspects of today’s corporate training challenges.
This latest survey focused on training administration and operations. Questions explored a variety of issues, including administrative functions performed, percentage of current budget spent on administrative services, biggest challenges, management of services, use of outsourcing and planned spending increases.
The following are survey highlights:
- Results show administrative expenses are high in most organizations: 7.3 percent of respondents said their companies spent more than 50 percent of their training budgets on administration and operations, 10 percent spent between 36 percent and 5 percent and 30 percent spent 20 percent to 35 percent.
- Interestingly, only 14.7 percent of respondents thought administrative-related spending was too high, and 65 percent thought it was “about right.”
- About 60 percent of respondents saw spending on administration and operations increase over the next two years, 15.7 percent projected spending would stay the same, 5.4 percent predicted it would decrease and 18.4 percent said spending likely would fluctuate.
- An overwhelming majority of respondents think the biggest administrative efficiencies could be gained by upgrading current technology (70.3 percent). Respondents rated adding additional staff (34.7 percent) and increasing staff training (28.4 percent) as other changes that could improve efficiency.
- The most common administrative and operational functions used for training are program scheduling (83.8 percent), program evaluations (78.1 percent), material fulfillment (75.4 percent), registration services (73.7 percent) and student and program reporting (74.1 percent).
- Administrative challenges most frequently listed by respondents are heavy workloads (57.4 percent), inadequate technical support (46.6 percent), limited budget (40.4 percent) and lack of qualified personnel (39.9 percent).
“Training administration consumes way too many dollars in most companies — and despite the spending, there are still high levels of dissatisfaction in the services provided,” said Mohana Radhakrishnan, Expertus vice president of client services. “The even bigger problem is that every dollar spent on administration is a dollar less spent on actual training. Employee development has a positive bottom-line impact, while administrative expenses have no incremental value.
“We believe training administration and operations are areas where most companies — no matter their size — can gain significant efficiencies. As seen in this survey, most companies view these expenses as necessary and fixed. However, we’ve seen companies reduce administrative expenses by as much as 55 percent to 60 percent through the effective use of technology, personnel resources and shared services.”
