purplecthulhu

[Training not making money in the short term] This is probably why, in my experience, the public sector has a generally positive attitude toward training.

(Aside: As purplecthulhu points out, there is no one Monolithic Public Sector, certainly not now. There is, of course, no one Monolithic Private Sector, either.)

Your experience sounds positive :-)

It tends to hold on to its employees for longer, does financial planning several years ahead and is not generally out to make a profit.

We could say that there are two main classes of reasons for doing a thing:

• For the thing itself
• As a means to some other end

The primary goal of `the private sector' is to make financial profits - any commercial, business or industrial activity is in itself secondary, `merely' a means to the profit. This is frequently rationalised in terms of fiscal probity. It is true that there is a physical `conservation of resources', and financial accounting is a way to ensure that the resources are available for an activity to continue. But money is only a simple, flawed analogue for "the things that `we' really need and want", such as having a good quality of life, and keep our training up-to-date.

The primary goal of the public sector is slightly harder to define: "To provide the services needed by society as a whole?" Because the thing itself should now be the motivation, there ought to be better balance in the public sector: between the needs of the many and of the few, between long and short term, between work and life etc. Unfortunately, the principle of conservation of resources can be forgotten.

There is also a diverse `non-profit' sector, where strange mixtures of commercial principles, public service, gift economics, obsession and so on, uneasily co-exist.

There are goals and tasks, there are resources, and there are people. The needs, wants, potential benefits and resources have to be co-ordinated among the people. There are many different ways of achieving that co-ordination, partly depending upon the weight given to the different aspects of the problem.

Are the kind of training programmes which purplecthulhu might consider acceptable actually going to make significant financial profit for the directors and shareholders of any given company? Of course, without a reliable accounting mechanism, no one is really going to know what is the financial benefit to a company of employee training! But in any case, the employees are not necessarily shareholders - an employee accepts their wage as their main benefit from the activities of the company.

I think there is slow progress toward training being seen in a positive light in business.

This might only be a fashion? Why should there be a permanent, irreversible change in business lore?

more managers now realise that an educationally stagnant workforce is just plain uncompetitive, or that buying in expertise can cost more than growing it.

(Must ... not ... upchuck ... at ... this ... verb ... `to grow expertise'... :-)

Sometimes, an educationally stagnant workforce probably is competitive - in a technologically stagnant industry, perhaps?