October 14, 1998 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Large employers provide more training for employees

In 1995, formal training was more likely to be provided by employers with 500 or more employees (98 percent) than by medium employers with 100-499 employees (94 percent) or by small employers with 50 to 99 employees (91 percent).

Employees also were more likely to have received formal training in medium-sized employers (73 percent) and large employers (71 percent) than in smaller establishments (62 percent) during 1995.

[Table data—TXT]

Small employers provided fewer hours of formal training than did medium or large employers in 1995. From the employer survey, employers with 50-99 employees provided an average of about 6 hours of formal training, compared with about 12 hours for both employers with 100-499 employees and employers with 500 or more.

Employees in establishments with 500 or more employees spent 39 percent of their total training time in formal training, compared with 20 percent for employees in establishments with fewer than 100 employees.  These findings support the argument for economies of scale in formal training.

These data are a product of the BLS Survey of Employer-Provided Training. Additional information is available from  "Results from the 1995 Survey of Employer-Provided Training", Monthly Labor Review, June 1998.