TRAINING: Investment or gamble?

Few people would contest the statement that ‘training is an investment’. It is an investment in the future, one which it is essential for industry to undertake in order to meet the continually growing demand for skilled personnel to handle the ever increasing pace of change. Rightly, then, training as an investment is emphasised on basic training officer courses, it is the subject of many a Government exhortation and prominent businessmen go out of their way to emphasise their belief in it. It is widely publicised by the Industrial Training Boards. The slogan ‘train and gain’ was not coined by an Industrial Training Board simply to advertise the fact that they had been throwing money around as though it were going out of fashion, it was also intended to emphasise the long term gains to be made by investing in training. Looking even further back to the discussions which preceded the passing of the Industrial Training Act, one of the objectives much stressed when the levy and grant system was established was to spread the costs of this investment evenly across industry. The firms who undertook training were to be subsidised by those who benefited from it but did not undertake it. Talking and listening to training practitioners it seems axiomatic that training is an investment and equally axiomatic that, due to the inexplicable failure of management to recognise this, it is one which is in danger of being seriously neglected. To doubt what is so evidently the case is something which, in the training field, amounts to nothing less than heresy.