RESEARCH REPORT: Education and Training: Springboard or Hurdle?

At a meeting of financial directors/planners at Manchester Business School, concern was expressed at the way education and training (E&T) was being managed within companies at the strategic business level; in particular, whether E&T was being regarded as a consumptive good to be met from profits and hence being cut in stringent times, or whether it was regarded as an investment which was fundamental to the long‐term success of the business. These two fundamentally different approaches require different financial treatments. In the first, E&T would be regarded as a cost centre for which the expenditure is written off in the year of occurrence: in the latter, E&T should be treated like any other strategic investment and subjected to their different set of planning and control procedures. In other words, was E&T being managed as a hurdle which had to be jumped for the organisation to continue functioning for the next year or as a springboard to long‐term success? In either case, was it possible to bring E&T expenditure under stricter financial control to the benefit of the organisation as a whole? Though there have been several surveys on E&T of late, these presented little evidence on the financial and strategic aspects of its management, so the Financial Research Control Institute (FCRI) was asked by the companies to carry out a pilot survey into current practice in the appraisal of E&T as a revenue investment.