The NHS has had its funding cut heavily over the last few years and I recently heard about one Trust which is struggling to reduce spending on training by a massive forty percent.
One casualty of this cut was an immediate withdrawal of all postgraduate training funding, even for current students. I believe in the importance and value of education at all levels – I wouldn’t be working in a university if I didn’t! But for me, this approach to balancing the books also raises an important issue relevant to work psychology: that training is rarely seen as an essential in organisations, especially when it comes to budget time.
At first glance, it’s easy to see why. The effects of training are often hard to measure and may well take time to come to fruition. It can be particularly difficult for postgraduate, higher level study. For example, how can we capture the effect of developing employees’ critical thinking skills? Or how do we demonstrate the importance of developing research skills in employees who are not primarily researchers?
Yet a recent longitudinal study (Kim and Ployhart, 2014) looked at the effect of training on organisations' profitability and recovery from the recession and found something that should give those about to chop the training budget pause for thought. In their study of 359 organisations over 12 years, the authors found that those who had more training outperformed their competitors before the recession and recovered more quickly afterwards.
This study, and others like it, demonstrate that training should be an element of long-term planning and sustainability rather than a luxury that can be cut when budgets get tight. If this message can get out, we might be able to build workplaces where training is considered an essential and employees are encouraged to engage in lifelong learning.