Do Bigger Companies Have Bigger Training Departments?

Insight from our State of L&D 2017 report.

It’s no secret that the average training team is small. In 2016, we found in our State of L&D report that 59% of teams consist of 10 people or fewer. This year, we wanted to find out just how small those teams go, and whether you can find yourself a big training team by joining a bigger company.

In our survey with InSync Training this year, we found that 71% of teams have fewer than 10 people. In fact, 37% of training teams are only 1-3 people.

So do bigger companies have bigger teams?

It turns out that the size of the company has little to do with the size of the team. While this reflects that organizations are not investing in people resources for an official training department, it could also indicate that training is pocketed within larger departments rather than being separated into a central function. Of the small and mid-size (up to 1,000 personnel) organizations surveyed, training department size typically consisted of 4-10 full-time personnel.

Industry may have something to do with department size. Within “heavily regulated” sectors, average training department size was significantly larger, controlling for overall size of the organization.

However, the best way to spot a large training department is by whether they offer blended learning. Respondents who reported using multiple instructional delivery methods and who provided advanced definitions of blended learning tended to belong to larger training departments.

So if you’re looking to join a big team in the next step in your career, consider researching what kind of training content a company produces. It might just tell you more than any LinkedIn company size field can reveal.