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June 1998, Vol. 121, No. 6
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. 133381, 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. 12546, 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 BLS programs
Employer-Provided Training
- 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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