With computer viruses and sophisticated hackers attacking every day, every business faces information technology issues. It's not easy to know how to handle digital connectivity issues if you don't understand how your IT staff fits into the picture. That means your staff needs training and it's important for you to know the future of IT training. That's why we put together the following eight tips on training trends. 

Who are the most common industries looking for training? They are Information Technology, healthcare, financial services, manufacturers and government agencies. The size of businesses looking for training is an interesting trend, too. About 57% of training searches occur on behalf of large enterprises; 27% of medium size businesses seek training and only 16% of small firms.

2016/2017 U.S. Training Report: Industry Trends reported on its survey of 500+ HR and learning and development users. The largest segment of survey respondents (70%) said that employee development was very important to them. Another 20% said employee development was "quite important" to them, 9% answered that it was somewhat important, and only 1% said it was not important at all. 

The survey's respondents also indicated that a little less than 1/3 of the respondents (29%) said they spent 11-25% of their work week sourcing training. Another 23% said they spent 26-50% of their work week sourcing training. The third largest group of respondents (19%) said they spent 51-75% of their work week sourcing training.

How do most companies prefer to pay for training? A full 50% of companies preferred to pay from invoices for courses. One group of 20% preferred paying at the training site and another 20% preferred online payments. Only 10% of the survey respondents preferred paying by phone.

How do annual training budgets compare?  It may surprise you to find out that almost a full third (30%) of the survey respondents had no budget for training on a per person basis. 28% of the respondents budgeted per person allotments of $100 - $500. Almost the same percentage (26%) of respondents said they had per person budgets of $1,000 or more.  Budgets less than $100 was the response for 4% of the survey takers and another 12% didn't know whether they had such a budget.

Is there a preferred learning style? The responses were pretty evenly split between 41% who preferred classroom style, public sessions. Another 43% preferred on-site training.  Self-paced e-learning pleased 12% and 4% chose e-learning webinars.

What can we expect in terms of next year's budgets? Increase? Stay the Same? Decrease? The largest group of respondents (42%) expected the training budget to remain the same. The next largest group (38%) expected their training budgets to increase and 20% of respondents expected a decrease in training budgets.

The survey asked respondents who was responsible for sourcing training for their companies. By far the most respondents (37%) tapped the HR department for training sources. Another 21% indicated that the HR department and managers were responsible for sourcing training for their companies. The remaining 42% of respondents' answers divided between HR and employees (17%), managers only (13%), managers and employees (10%) and only 2% left sourcing training up to employees alone.

What were the biggest challenges that survey respondents faced in searching for trainers? More than 1/3 of respondents (38%) said that finding qualified trainers was the biggest problem. One-quarter (25%) of respondents said that they had difficulty finding training for a competitive price. Less than one-quarter (19%) said they had trouble determining training needs and 18% said they had trouble getting internal approval to even buy the training.

When asked to rank the most important factors in selecting trainers, the survey respondents answered that location was the most important factor, followed by certification options, quality of the trainer, customer service, quality of training content, use of new technology and, last on the list, was price.

To learn how companies plan to fill the IT gap, read the techrepublic.com article entitled "CIO Jury: 83% of CIOs struggle to find tech talent."