While the recession caused difficulties for many businesses directly, some are now seeing another indirect consequence on the workforce.
As they sought to lower their expenses and improve efficiency amid the economic downturn, many companies decreased their efforts to train their employees, USA Today notes. Now, that trend has widened the gap in skills between experienced and inexperienced employees and may be contributing to unemployment, as it makes it more difficult for people to gain skills and become valuable to both current and prospective employers. At the same time, federal funding to train unemployed workers fell 16 percent this fiscal year, making it more difficult for those individuals to improve their prospects.
Research comparing current practices to those of the last few years and those used in decades past suggests a trend of employees spending less time being trained. Manufacturers are among the more heavily affected businesses, according to experts.
While many companies have struggled to maintain employee benefit coverage and other policies that assist workers, they may need to increase the effort and resources they devote to training workers for the sake of their own productivity.
