Who trains: A picture of companies' training practices throughout the UK

Project date: April 2009

Background to this project

If policy makers are to encourage employers to take greater levels of responsibility for training their employees, we need to develop a better understanding of how companies train and the type of employees that are most likely to receive training. This research report, entitled Who Trains (PDF), presents a picture of companies’ training practices in the UK and helps identify those groups that are less likely to receive training. 

Project overview and approach

‘Who Trains’ presents our analysis of the UK Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). WERS collects information on the training practices of businesses located in the UK.

Various aspects of the organisations and their staff, such as company size and gender balance, were compared with two different aspects of training:

• The amount of time given off to train experienced employees from the organisation’s largest occupational group.
• The number of training days given to members of the organisation’s largest occupational group.
  

Key findings

Two key findings emerge from our analysis:

• Unskilled employees are the least likely to be given training. This is a worrying finding in terms of opportunity and progression; it suggests that those with the least skills are also provided with little opportunity to change this, while those with higher skills continue their development.
• Women are not getting recognised financially by employers for the training they undertake. Some of this effect is likely to come from women working in smaller organisations and lower-paying sectors (such as caring), but the pattern emerges across all sectors and despite the results showing that higher paid staff are more likely to be given training. 
  

Next steps

There are a number of key policy questions to emerge from this report. How can we give the unskilled, performing routine manual tasks, greater access to training, and how can we get employers to recognise the value of training for women to the same degree as they do for men? 

Recommendations based on the findings from this analysis are being used to shape CSD’s ongoing discussions with policy makers, researchers, employers and their representative groups.