If you’d like to know where American companies are spending most of their training dollars today, you’ll find out by reading the Brandon Hall Group’s 2015 Training Study. Let’s review some of the study’s findings.

The Cost to Develop One Hour of Training Increased Nearly 13% between 2014 and 2015

The study found that in 2014, the average cost to develop one hour of training was $3,396. One year later, that cost had increased to $3,826. Our take-away lesson? It is more important than ever for companies to be on the lookout for customizable training that delivers the best results in the most cost-effective packages.

Technical Training Claims the Biggest Part of Training Budgets

Companies are spending most of their training dollars to teach: technical skills; product/service knowledge; sales skills; and individual competencies. It’s interesting to note that those training objectives come ahead of leadership or team training – which we think are critically important to any organization’s success.

Companies Spend More on Training Senior Employees than on Entry-Level

To quote from the study, “Organizations are almost twice as likely to spend $2,000 per learner on senior leadership than they are on high-potentials.” We think that raises some questions. While training upper-level executives and managers is important, isn’t it just as important to train front-line and entry-level employees, whose work increases customer satisfaction, improves overall efficiency and drives profits? Perhaps companies should be taking a closer look to be sure their training priorities are correct.

The Larger a Company Is, the More It Spends onTraining

That might sound like an obvious finding, but it provides some food for thought. Shouldn’t smaller companies rely on training to help them grow and compete against bigger and more successful organizations? We believe they should. Even when training budgets are small, training is the key to building competitive competence, market share, and profits.

Cost-Effective Training Is the Key

What’s the biggest take-away lesson from the Brandon Hall study? It could be that the greatest challenge today is to use training that gets results, but which is highly cost-effective too.