Employees’ training and development needs are being greatly addressed with a higher average number of training hours and continuous corporate commitment to training budget, according to the 2011 Training and Development Needs Survey by the Hong Kong Institute of Human Resource Management (HKIHRM).

A total of 121 companies, employing over 139,000 full-time employees, joined the 2011 Survey conducted during the period from June to August 2011.

The average number of training hours per employee per annum rebounded from the record low of 17.9 hours in 20101 to 19.9 hours this year. Eighty-nine percent of respondents indicated that their employees received on average more than five hours of training per annum.

The retail sector provided the highest number of training hours (28.3 hours), followed by business services/professional services (26 hours), and transport/logistics (21.1 hours).

Investment in Training and Development

According to the survey, 95 companies indicated that they had a training and development budget for 2011. The proportion of training and development budget to total annual base salary was 2.7% on average (reported by 80 companies), 0.1 percentage point lower than that in 2010 (2.8%).

The construction/real estate/property development sector allocated the highest budget (5.9%).  The wholesale, import/export, trading, distribution sector reported the lowest budget (2.1%). 

“The survey results showed that companies realized the importance of employee training by continuously spending on development programmes while the average number of training hours per employee per annum bounced back this year,” says Francis Mok, President of the HKIHRM and Co-chairperson of its Learning and Development Committee.