How Much Do You Spend on Learning?
Whenever I get involved with a client's learning or HR organization, I ask, early on, how much the company spends on learning. Ten years ago, one in ten could answer that question; today, it may be two in ten, or, at best, three in ten.
I remember an engagement with a global investment bank when we were brought in to help the director of learning quantify how much they were spending. The head of learning thought it was $100 million; the CFO believed it was half a billion.
The director of learning was a lot closer (the figure turned out to be $150 million), but that’s not the point. If no one can tell me how much you’re spending on learning, who’s reporting those figures to ASTD, Bersin, Saratoga, Hackett, and the others? It’s sort of a Zen question.
In November and December of last year I was contacted by a number of reporters who were writing about how the economic crash was affecting training budgets. The first question was whether big companies were instituting training freezes, like the one famously imposed by DuPont circa 1990. What I said was that in most big companies, training is so decentralized – and the responsibility for spending so broadly distributed – that it’s very difficult to influence spending on an enterprise basis, unless you’re the CEO or CFO: they’re the only two places where the budgets converge (even the CHRO or CLO normally controls a very small percentage of training expenditures).
Many of us in the L&D profession are inclined to grumble over the cocktail hour that what we do is insufficiently valued by the business. But tell me: how many processes do companies invest in where they can’t quantify what they’re putting in, can’t quantify what they’re getting out, and still continue to invest?
