One of the only pieces of good news to come out of our latest training benchmarking research is the increase in leadership development spending.
In 2008, the first year of marked declines in training spending, funding for leadership development programs dipped to 17% of total L&D dollars. In 2009, leadership development funding rebounded to 24% - with 18% of training dollars going to management/supervisory training and another 6% to executive development. This is an encouraging sign. It indicates that companies are moving beyond a short-term, "crisis management" mode and are looking to strengthen their leadership teams for future success.
Our most recent TalentWatch report confirms that businesses are looking positively toward the future. Having completed the layoffs and restructuring, fully 40 percent of business and HR leaders see accelerating growth six months into the future.
So we are now reentering a marketplace in which talent is important. For many L&D organizations, the next several quarters are going to shift attention back toward key initiatives - things like building a strong and capable leadership team, and revisiting learning and talent management system purchases - that were temporarily sidelined when the economy took a dive.