Luxembourg's national statistics office, Statec, has issued a report showing the results of a survey that shows that the percentage of companies involved in training their staff reached 77% in 2015.

6 out of 10 employees have been able to benefit from continuing vocational training courses; the cost of these training measures represents 2.1% of the payroll.

Companies are giving more and more importance to continuing vocational training. 77% of companies were training in 2015 against 71% in 2010. This rate is 100% among large companies and 68% among small companies. The resource and energy sectors, as well as transportation and communications, have the highest percentages. In both sectors, growth has been particularly strong over the past decade.

A wide variety of training is offered to employees

The types of training offered most often are external courses (62% of companies), internal courses (53%), conferences (55%) and on-the-job training (53%).

In 2015, 62% of employees were trained in CVT courses, i.e. more than 170,000 individual employees.

1.2% of working time was spent there, twice as much as 20 years ago. This rate increases with the size of the company. Each trained person took an average of 35 hours of classes.

The courses focused on technical and practical skills specific to a particular task (75% of companies), but were also devoted to customer relations (23%) and the use of IT tools (21%), management (19%) and languages (17%).

2/3 of the courses are organised internally, 1/3 by external service providers. Among these, they are mainly private training institutes and secondly employers' organisations and professional chambers.

One hour of lessons costs on average €53

62% of this cost comes from the absence of trained staff, 38% corresponds to the actual cost of the courses. 25% of training companies benefited from public subsidies covering an average of 14% of their training costs. The organisation of continuing vocational training is well anchored in large companies but little structured in small companies.

While 77% of the companies offer training and 73% conduct an assessment of their training needs, only 38% have a training manager, 33% a budget and 30% a training plan. Among large companies, almost all have these tools, while they are rare among the small ones.

Staff representatives are involved in the organisation of CVT in 23% of companies (in 80% of companies with 1,000 or more employees).

Most companies have been able to afford the training deemed necessary without encountering obstacles. For others, the main hurdles felt were the high costs of training and the lack of time of employees.