Continuity and change: employers’ training practices and partnerships with training providers

Conclusion

The results from the Employer survey are very clear about the major factors which employers say are very important reasons why they offer training to their employees. The top five factors are in order:

Improving the quality of goods and services

New technology

Business strategy

Licensing requirements

Workplace health and safety requirements.

In effect, the answers to the survey reveal that the drivers for training provision amongst employers are very straightforward – the ability to adopt new technologies, the need to improve quality, responses to market pressures and the need to meet regulatory requirements such as licensing and health and safety. With regard to market pressures, over 7 per cent of employers nominated ‘business strategy’ as the most important factor but over 47 per cent of employers put business strategy as one of the key factors that drive decisions to train. Both business strategy and market pressures may be viewed as responses to the competitiveness of the business environment for employers. In the survey over 73 per cent of employers stated that the intensity of competition had increased rapidly or increased steadily in the past 5 years. In regard to quality, 19.2 per of employers stated that this was their most important reason for providing training (the same proportion as for new technology). However, when asked to nominate all their reasons for providing training, 62.5 percent of employers nominated quality as one of their key reasons for training. Quality is thus a dominant reason for employers to provide training.

About two thirds of employers stated that they had increased the amount of training that they had provided to their employees over the last 5 years. Over 60 per cent of employers stated that in an ideal world they would have provided more training to their employees. When asked to nominate the major reasons why they had not provided the amount of training they would have wished, employers tended to nominate two key reasons.

1. 
   Lack of time. This included time for managers to organise training, for employees to give training to others, and for employees to undertake training themselves.
   
2. 
   Lack of money available for training.
   

Thus the major barriers to providing training related to organisational resources – either lack of funding or lack of time.

A key element that has been found in past research in employer training emerged strongly in this research project, i.e. the effect of employer size on propensity to train. In every aspect, larger employers provide more training to their employees, they have a more formal and structured approach to training and usually support a higher degree of training infrastructure – training staff and training budgets etc. Larger companies are also more likely to have increased the amount of training over the previous five years.

The qualitative interviews with employers reinforced the importance of improving the skill levels of employees and of workplace health and safety, licensing and regulation as drivers for training. The interviews also confirmed the commitment of employers to training (although this commitment is likely to be linked to their propensity to engage with the research) and the importance of individuals within organisations who drive the growth of training. Internal organisational matters emerged in these interviews; for example the need to justify training to senior management, and the need for good record keeping and constant monitoring of effectiveness of training.

There had been some changes since the employer survey carried out in 2003 (Smith, E et al., 2005) as part of the project on nationally recognised training. In 2003, slightly more employers said that they provided more training to their employees compared to similar organisations – 38.6 per cent in 2003 as opposed to 33.7 per cent in 2015. In 2003, 58.8 per cent of employers said that the amount of training they provided had increased compared to 51.3 per cent in 2015. Yet the data reported on the previous page shows two thirds of 2015 employers believing they offered more training than five years previously. With relation to the impact of nationally recognised training, in 2015, more employers than in 2003 thought that the reason for the increase in their total training activity was connected to the use of nationally recognised training (52.7 per cent) than in 2003 (39.1 per cent).

Two conclusions emerge from these data. It appears that over the twelve-year period, employers may have increased the amount of training they do (acknowledging the contradictions in the data); and that the use of nationally recognised training may have become an increased driver for an overall increase in training activity.

It should be noted as a limitation that different employers were surveyed in 2015 compared with 2003, although in both studies the samples were representative of industry distribution, and the composition of the samples by employer size was the same. Some tables with more detail comparing the two surveys (2003 and 2015) are provided later in this Support Document.

The results of this research generally support the findings of previous work in this area. In line with Australian statistics, most employers in the survey provided training to their employees even if the level of training was not as high as they might have wished (NCVER, 2013). The size of the employers is also critical in the providing of training (McGraw, 2014; Freyens, 2006). In line with Smith and Hayton’s (1999) study, the drivers for training are relatively straightforward, but the decision to train is mediated by a variety of organisation-specific factors.

Detailed findings from the survey of registered training organisations (RTOs)

Responses to the RTO survey were received from 20 TAFE Institutes and 87 non-TAFE RTOs (response rates of 40% and 5.4% respectively).

Question 3 of the survey asked the respondents to classify their organisation. Responses to this question allowed the responses from the RTOs (n=107) to be split between public and private RTOs. To analyse and report on the data, responses were divided into three groups, TAFE Institutes (n=20), for-profit private RTOs (n=55) and non-profit private RTOs (n=32). Private RTOs comprised 81% of respondents (51% for-profit and 30% non-profit) with the remaining 19% of respondents from TAFE Institutes.

Apart from the questions relating only to certain categories of respondents, such as Questions 16, 24, 31, 33, and 35, all questions were answered by the vast majority of respondents.