What do firms of different sizes spend on training?

Benchmarking a training budget against a published average is only useful if the average describes companies of a similar shape. In this field it usually does not, because the difference by company size is larger than almost any other difference in the data.

The European Continuing Vocational Training Survey covers every enterprise with ten or more employees and breaks its results into three size classes. The 2020 round is the most recent published.

The three size classes

A large employer spends two and a half times as much per head as a small one. That is the headline and it is the number usually quoted.

The more interesting number is underneath it. In a small firm, 27.5 percent of employees attended a training course during the year. In a large one, 54.5 percent did. Almost exactly double.

Most of the gap is access, not generosity

Dividing spend per employee by the participation rate gives roughly what each trained person received.

The two smaller classes are indistinguishable from each other. A person trained at a 30-person company and a person trained at a 200-person company received almost exactly the same amount of investment in 2020.

The large-firm figure is about a quarter higher, which is a real difference and a much smaller one than the headline suggests. Most of what separates a small employer from a large one on training is not how much they spend on each person they train. It is how many people they train at all.

That reframes the benchmarking question. A small company comparing itself to the 615 euro European average and concluding it underspends by nearly half is drawing the wrong conclusion. The relevant question is whether the people it does train are getting a comparable amount, and by that measure a small firm at 1,200 euro per trained person is doing what its mid-sized peers do.

Why access scales and spend does not

Three mechanisms account for most of this, and they are worth separating because two of them can be addressed and one cannot.

Fixed costs of provision. Running any structured programme requires someone to design it, source it and administer it. Below a certain headcount there is nobody whose job that is, which is why the share of enterprises providing any training at all falls steeply with size. Across the EU-27 in 2020, 67.4 percent of enterprises with ten or more employees provided some form of training, ranging from 17.5 percent in Romania to 96.8 percent in Latvia.

Cohort economics. A workshop for twelve people costs about the same as a workshop for six. A large employer can fill a cohort from one function; a small one cannot fill a cohort at all, which pushes it towards open programmes bought per seat. Those are generally more expensive per head and less tailored, which is one reason the per-trained-person figures come out closer than the per-employee ones.

Release capacity. This is the one that does not scale away. In a ten-person team, sending one person on a two-day course removes a tenth of the capacity for two days. In a two-hundred-person function it removes half a percent. The constraint on small-firm training is frequently not the invoice, it is who covers the work.

What this means for a leadership budget

Three practical points follow.

Compare to your size class, not to the average. The EU-27 figure of 615 euro per employee is dominated by large enterprises, which employ a large share of the workforce. For a company under 250 people the relevant reference points are 342 and 436 euro.

Look at coverage before looking at spend. If the diagnosis is that too few people are developed rather than that each is developed too cheaply, then the answer is a different distribution rather than a bigger number. That is precisely the trade that European employers as a whole have been making: spending per trained person has fallen by about a quarter in real terms since 2005 while participation has risen by ten percentage points.

Watch what the coverage buys. Spreading the same money further is only progress if the thinner version still works. The evidence on that is mixed and specific: practice, spacing and a proper needs analysis are the design features that separate programmes that change behaviour from those that do not, and all three are what gets cut when the hours per person fall. The average trained European employee received about 22 hours in 2020, against about 28 in 2005.

Caveats on the data

These figures cover all continuing vocational training, from forklift certification to executive programmes. Leadership development is a small and comparatively expensive slice, so the absolute numbers are a floor rather than a target for a management development budget. The size pattern is what transfers.

The survey excludes enterprises with fewer than ten employees entirely, so it says nothing about the smallest firms. And the 2020 reference year was the first pandemic year, which disrupted classroom training in particular. The size pattern was present in earlier waves too, so it is not an artefact of that year, but the levels should be read with it in mind. The next round covers 2025 and is not yet published.

Common questions

How much should a small company spend on training per employee? In the EU in 2020, enterprises with 10 to 49 employees spent 342 euro per person employed, and those with 50 to 249 spent 436 euro. Both are well below the 615 euro EU average, which is pulled up by large employers.

Do large companies spend more per trained person? Somewhat, but much less than the headline suggests. Implied spend per trained person was about 1,244 euro in the smallest class, 1,246 in the middle class and 1,576 in the largest.

Why do small firms train fewer people? Chiefly fixed costs of provision, cohort economics that make internal programmes impractical below a certain size, and release capacity: sending one person away costs a much larger share of a small team's output.

What share of employees gets trained? 54.5 percent in enterprises with 250 or more employees, 35.0 percent in those with 50 to 249, and 27.5 percent in those with 10 to 49. The EU-27 average is 42.4 percent.

How many companies provide any training at all? 67.4 percent of EU enterprises with ten or more employees in 2020, ranging from 17.5 percent in Romania to 96.8 percent in Latvia.

Are these figures specific to leadership development? No. They cover all continuing vocational training. Leadership programmes are a small and more expensive part of the total, so these are a floor rather than a benchmark for management development.

Where does the data come from? The Continuing Vocational Training Survey, run every five years by the statistical offices of the European Union. The 2020 round is the sixth and most recent published; data for 2025 has been collected but not yet released.

Sources

1. Eurostat, Cost of CVT courses per person employed in all enterprises (trng_cvt_17s)
2. Eurostat, Participants in CVT courses as a percentage of persons employed (trng_cvt_12s)
3. Eurostat, Cost of CVT courses per participant (trng_cvt_19s)
4. Eurostat, Statistics on continuing vocational training in enterprises