Results from the 1995 Survey of Employer-Provided Training

In recent years, the issue of worker training has been pushed to the forefront of public policy circles. Concerns center around the decline in real wages of less educated workers, the effect of work organization on the demand for skills in the workplace, and the question whether U.S. workers are appropriately trained to meet the challenge of changes in job requirements brought about by the introduction of new technology. In spite of the importance of this issue, substantial gaps exist in our knowledge of such fundamental questions as how much training takes place, who provides it, and who gets it. The lack of high-quality data on the amount of training being provided and on the costs of such training has been due primarily to the difficulty in measuring these variables. Because no universally accepted definition of training exists, estimates on the amount of training vary considerably from survey to survey. Some surveys collect information only on training that is highly structured, such as time spent in formal company training programs. This kind of approach ignores the more unstructured, informal ways in which employees can learn job-related skills. The aim of this article is to fill in some of these gaps, making use of data recently collected in a survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the 1995 Survey of Employer-Provided Training (SEPT95). This survey has a number of unique features that make it a valuable source of data for studying training practices: information on both formal and informal training is collected; the intensity of training is measured in such a way as to minimize recall problems; data on training expenditures are collected, making use of records already kept; and both establishments and employees at those establishments are surveyed, providing a wide range of characteristics that can be used in an analysis of training intensity. The sections that follow use results from SEPT95 to address a number of different questions about employer-provided training: How much training is provided? How much of training is formal and how much is informal? How much do establishments spend on training? And what types of establishments offer training, and what types of employees are receiving it?