March 03, 2005 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Frequency and nature of worker training

During the six-year period, 1989-1994, 53.2 percent of respondents in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLS79) never received any formal training. The respondents ranged in age from 24 to 37 during this period.

[Chart data—TXT]

About a quarter of respondents received one spell of training, and about an eighth received two.

The most common type of training was formal company training, which accounted for 37.5 percent of all training spells. This was followed by seminars or training programs outside of work (18.4 percent) and seminars or training programs at work run by someone other than the employer (15.8 percent). Vocational or technical institutes were the fourth most-common type of training (9.7 percent of all training spells).

These data are from the BLS National Longitudinal Surveys program. The sample upon which the above figures are based consisted of 8,095 individuals who responded to each annual NLS79 interview between 1989 and 1994. For additional information, see "Worker training: what we’ve learned from the NLSY79," by Harley J. Frazis and James R. Spletzer, Monthly Labor Review, February 2005.