industry report

The year was 1982, and Training magazine had just published its first-ever Industry Report. Training professionals across the United States spent $2.95 billion on four categories of products and services: hardware, off-the-shelf materials, custom-designed materials and outside services. Fast-forward 20 years, and not only have the categories changed—we now track seminars and conferences, custom materials, off-the-shelf materials and other—but the amount spent has increased by an incredible 555 percent, reaching $19.3 billion.

Indeed, it's an incredible jump of about $16.4 billion in two decades, but when put in the proper perspective, it becomes even more astonishing. Consider: In 1982, there were slightly more than 100 million U.S. workers. Today, there are more than 135 million employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So while purchases have increased a whopping 555 percent, our workforce has only grown by 35 percent—and that's just the civilian labor pool.

Such drastic changes can be expected, even projected, when dealing with any 20-year period. And while the monetary investments, topics and delivery methods have undoubtedly gone through some hefty swings (we no longer track the use of 16mm film projectors, for example), the common denominator between then and now is quite simply the fact that businesses are still investing billions of dollars annually in the hopes of capitalizing on the one true competitive advantage—human capital.

For the past 20 years, we've brought you this report, the most comprehensive and authoritative information available anywhere on the extent and nature of employer-sponsored training in the United States—the skills taught, the methods employed to teach them and the dollars invested.

As always, our annual Industry Report details the formal training activity of U.S. organizations with 100 or more employees. As in the past, we drew on a random sample of Training subscribers to gather the data, beginning with prequalification phone interviews to ensure that each potential respondent was, in fact, the best-qualified person in the organization to answer the questions we posed about employee training. Qualified respondents were then directed to a secure Web site where they completed our questionnaire online. The response rate was an incredible 42.7 percent (1,652 usable responses from a pool of 3,873 qualified candidates), with a precision estimate of plus or minus 1.4 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.