Making the commitment

What does it take for an organization to become a leader in workplace training? The answer, according to the 2000 American Society for Training & Development State of the Industry Report, is an organization-wide commitment to training and development, as shown in how many employees receive training, how much training they receive, how much the organization spends on training, and how much training is delivered via learning technologies. Those types of measures of commitment and innovation were used to identify "Training Investment Leaders" among the 1,200 organizations that either participated in ASTD's 1999 annual Benchmarking Service survey or were members of ASTD's Benchmarking Forum. Key findings, which include figures on the firms' training activities from the 2000 ASTD State of the Industry Report, are presented.