The long-term consequences of nontraditional employment (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, May 1998

Results from the 1995 Survey of Employer-Provided Training

Harley Frazis, Maury Gittleman, Michael Horrigan, and Mary Joyce

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.¹ 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.²
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?

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Footnotes

1 See Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, "U.S. Earnings Levels and Earnings Inequality: A Review of Recent Trends and Proposed Explanations," Journal of Economic Literature, September 1992, pp. 1333–81, for a survey of recent changes in the earnings structure; Paul Osterman, "Skill, Training and Work Organization in American Establishments," Industrial Relations, April 1995, pp. 125–46, for a discussion of the relationship between work organization and training; and Ann P. Bartel and Nachum Sicherman, "Technological Change and the Skill Acquisition of Young Workers," unpublished, April 1995, for an analysis of the effect of technological change on young workers’ acquisition of skills.

2 Lisa Lynch, "A Needs Analysis of Training Data: What Do We Want, What Do We Have, Can We Ever Get It?" in J. Haltiwanger, M. E. Manser, and R. Topel, eds., Labor Statistics Measurement Issues, NBER Studies in Income and Wealth (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Related Monthly Labor Review articles
Employer-provided training: results from a new survey. May 1995.

Job-related education and training: their impact on earnings. October 1993.
Training among young adults: who, what kind, and for how long? August 1993.

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