In 2005, $13.5 billion was spent on training products and services. However, a whopping 62 percent of companies surveyed said they do not provide any type of outplacement or retirement training, and 34 percent don't provide ethics training. With the forthcoming mass exodus of baby boomers, and with recent corporate reform initiatives, it may be surprising to not see these issues on firms' radar screens.

Other results of the survey:

• While training budgets remained the same in 2005 for about half of companies (regardless of size and industry), 26 percent of companies had larger budgets in 2005 than the prior year.
  
  
• The outsourcing of training is on the rise, with more organizations outsourcing both the design and delivery of their traditional training; 44 percent of organizations outsourced at least some of the development of their traditional training programs in 2005, compared to 41 percent in the prior year. Thirty-six percent of organizations outsourced the delivery of their traditional training programs in 2005.
  
  
• Organizations said that 70 percent of all their formal training courses are provided in classrooms with live instructors.
  
  
• Online training continues to hover at or under 5 percent for all categories, is usually far-surpassed by classroom training, and is most frequently used as a component of blended learning. A range of 15 to 30 percent of companies used both e-learning and traditional methods.

The full report is available at http://www.trainingmag.com/training/images/pdf/IndustryReport.pdf.