Training on a shoestring: even during a moratorium on expenditures, you can adopt tactics to maintain training momentum.

In March 2007, as Michigan faced a severe budget deficit, Gov. Jennifer Granholm ordered a moratorium on training expenditures for state employees. Her directive required that training outlays be deferred and limited to the most essential requirements.

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Training for state employees did not come to a standstill, however. Much of it went forward as trainers found money-saving ways to deliver training and made adjustments in the types of training they conducted.

For example, the Civil Service Commission still offers courses developed internally as well as those with an inventory of participant materials, says Matt Fedorchuk, a spokesman for the Office of Compensation and HRTD (Human Resource Training and Development) in Lansing. The office has temporarily shelved new programs requiring outside facilitators or purchase of materials.

As the economic crisis worsened last fall, most organizations were curtailing training expenditures to some extent. In Training Efficiency: Optimizing Costs, a 2008 survey by training provider Expertus and training information portal TrainingIndustry.com, 54 percent of trainers said they were under "significant" or "intense" pressure to cut costs, and 91 percent said they had felt pressured to some degree to do so. Forty-nine percent said their budgets bad been cut, and 60 percent had been asked to train more with no budget increases.

The retail, government, financial and travel industries number among those most likely to curtail framing, while those still in growth mode--health care, pharmaceuticals, petroleum and green energy--are less affected by the current financial catastrophe, says Jeanne Picardi, marketing director for The Training Associates, a contract framing firm in Westborough, Mass. "Certainly, businesses with narrow margins, such as small companies, will be more likely to cut training."

Analyze and Prioritize

Understandably, many trainers and HR managers are asking: What to do? Postpone all plans until a brighter tomorrow? Cancel upcoming classes? Those solutions are probably too drastic. But like the HR team in the Michigan agency, you may have to shelve some plans and get creative to continue meeting employees' needs.

Picardi says HR professionals should be "analyzing the costs and benefits of current methods, and seeking out new ways to deliver necessary training." She suggests "identifying and consolidating multiple vendor contracts for training into a single contract to receive volume discounts [and] being more selective when deciding who will receive training on what." Specifically, experts recommend that HR professionals: