Defining and measuring training activity

Defining and Measuring Training Activity is a project which intends to improve the UK Commission and its partners’ understanding of our large-scale employer surveys, and to improve the quality of the surveys in the future. The UK Commission runs two large, biannual, UK-wide employer surveys: the Employer Skills Survey (ESS), which looks at employers’ skill needs, vacancies, recruitment and training regimes, and the Employer Perspectives Survey (EPS), which looks at employers’ interactions with and perceptions of a range of government business support. In both of these surveys, we ask employers about the training they do. But training can be thought of and categorised in a number of different ways: Who pays for it? Where does it happen? Who delivers it? This project asked a small number of employers in detail about their definitions of training, aiming to get to the bottom of how UK employers from a range of different groups think about training in their own businesses. We will use this information not only to improve the questions we use in the surveys in future, but also to help us report the information we have gathered in our current surveys with deeper, richer context.