The MASIE Center has released a "Learning Resources Barometer," a survey of learning professionals about their budgets and how they're using them that will be updated periodically.
The results are scary and interesting. Scary part first: 62% of training budgets are being cut back. 36% of learning departments have been trimmed. The economic crunch is crunching us just like everybody else.
The most interesting part are the questions about how the training resources are being used. The biggest jumps (51% for both) are in e-learning (personal huzzah) and virtual/webinar training. The two next biggest winners in this economy are social learning (30% of organizations increasing) and the related user-generated content (29% increasing).
Knowing MASIE Center events, I'm guessing that these results are from the instant-polls at a recent learning conference. This is an excellent application of those in-event polling programs, but I'm wondering whether the results are affected by the self-selecting nature of the audience.
The immediate effect I can think of is that if (I don't know the actual poll source) this is from a learning conference, these participants would be from companies that may be spending a little more on training than the norm, if the companies are footing the bills to send these attendees.
Which is a depressing thought given the results about how many budgets are being cut, and could skew the 2.0/online/social learning results higher than the training world as a whole.
What's your feeling - do these results reflect what you're seeing on the streets?
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