Courses get booked by email, attendance lives in a spreadsheet, and certificates sit in someone’s inbox until an auditor asks for them. When the people who organise training are already stretched, it is often the first thing to slip.

That matters more than it used to. A good training management system will not close a skills gap on its own, but it can remove much of the admin that stops training from happening at all. To see why that is worth thinking about, it helps to start with what the numbers say about training in the UK.

Are UK employers training less?

The most detailed picture comes from the government’s Employer Skills Survey, a large telephone survey of almost 73,000 UK employers. Its 2022 results show that 60 per cent of employers had funded or arranged training for their staff in the previous 12 months, down from 66 per cent in 2017.

The same survey found that off-the-job training had fallen from 48 per cent of employers to 39 per cent over that period. Average investment in training per employee also dropped, from £2,010 in 2017 to £1,780 in 2022 after accounting for inflation. At the same time, the share of employers with at least one member of staff who was not fully proficient rose from 13 per cent to 15 per cent.

In other words, fewer businesses were training their people just as more of them reported skills gaps. Those gaps carry a real cost.

What do skills gaps actually cost a business?

The cost is not always visible on a balance sheet, but it shows up in missed work and lost contracts. Business Matters recently reported research from Pluralsight showing that skills gaps cost more than a third of UK firms at least £380,000 over a year. In the same survey, 39 per cent of respondents said they had failed to deliver key projects, and 27 per cent said they had lost a client or contract.

Numbers like these make the case for training easy to state. Delivering it consistently is harder, and that is usually where the real problem sits.

Why is training so hard to organise?

For many organisations, the difficulty is not finding a course. It is everything around it. Someone has to schedule sessions, book trainers and rooms, invite the right people, chase confirmations, handle cancellations, record who attended and keep certificates up to date.

When all of that runs through spreadsheets and email, small problems pile up. A session is double-booked, a renewal date is missed, or nobody can say for certain who completed a mandatory course last year. Each slip makes training feel like more trouble than it is worth. This is the gap a training management system is designed to fill.

What does a training management system do?

A training management system brings the admin of training into one place. Instead of separate spreadsheets for courses, bookings and attendance, the course, the session, the people booked onto it and their records all sit in the same system, so a change made once shows up everywhere it is needed.

In practice, that usually covers scheduling sessions and trainers, taking registrations and payments, sending reminders, tracking attendance and issuing certificates. For businesses that sell training, it can also publish course dates on their website and take bookings online. For businesses that train their own staff, it gives managers a clear record of who has completed what, and when renewals are due.

The result is less time spent organising training and more time spent delivering it. With so many tools on the market, though, the next question is how to choose well.

How should a business choose one?

The best starting point is the work you already do, not a feature list. Map out how a course moves from planning to completion today, and note where things go wrong. Those weak points are what the system needs to fix first.

From there, a few questions help narrow the field. Does it handle the way you deliver training, whether that is in a classroom, online or a mix of both? Can it connect to the tools you already use, such as your accounting software or CRM? Will managers and trainers find it easy enough to use every day? And can you get your existing records out of spreadsheets and into the new system without starting from scratch?

It is also worth asking how the system handles compliance. If your sector requires certain training to be renewed on a fixed cycle, the system should make it easy to see what is due and prove what has been done.

Final thoughts

The skills challenge facing UK businesses is not going away, and training remains one of the most direct ways to deal with it. What often holds businesses back is not a lack of willingness but the admin that surrounds every course. A well-chosen training management system takes much of that weight off the people who organise training, so more of it actually happens, and the business has a clear record of the skills it is building.

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