An open letter to university leaders: “now” is never the time to freeze training budgets
The UK higher education sector sucks right now. We’re witnessing unprecedented budget deficits, a sharp decline in international postgraduate recruitment numbers, and the - perhaps inevitable or just predictable - talk of redundancies and sharp budget cuts and freezes.
There are some obvious budgets that often climb to the top of the list as institutions seek to stabilise an unstable financial position:
Staff recruitment
Travel
Entertainment
Consultancy and outsourced skills
Training and conferences.
While I fully see the rationale in these budgets being obvious places to make savings, I’m urging university leaders to think twice before freezing or cutting training budgets. Indeed, at times like this the sector might actually need to increase such spend.
Cutting learning and development budgets dismantles our core belief in the essential value of learning
If the education sector truly believes in its own value and worth, then it goes without saying that we see learning as essential for development across all aspects of society. We believe as a sector that learning holds substantial value and is therefore worthy of investment. The moment that we stop investing in learning amongst our own staff we dismantle that belief and behave as though we instead view learning as optional, a luxury, or a “nice to have”. If we don’t continue to prioritise it, we create a new standard that suggests that others too - our prospective students or research funders and partners - also need not prioritise it, and that for them it can too be nice to have, but not essential. In other words, cutting budgets for staff learning and development crumbles the very foundational belief upon which higher education is built.
Freezing staff learning prioritises inertia over reinvention
Now more than ever at any time in history, higher education needs to embrace reinvention. Our systems, structures and approaches are failing us. We need change. But change is reliant on that very learning culture that we stand for and that we create. When we close off access to staff learning in times of financial crisis, we also close off the opportunity for them to grow, ideate and reinvent. We close off the very opportunity and radical rethinking that can get us through the crisis. Shutting off learning budgets is akin to sitting tight and riding it out in the hope that circumstances will change and the sector will magically resume some kind of buoyancy. And so if we are to reinvent, we must invest in learning, not freeze or cut those budgets.
An opportunity to reinvent learning
If we were ever to look to a sector for reinvention and innovation in learning approaches, surely it ought to be higher education that we look to, right? And yet many probably wouldn’t. They’d likely look to tech start-ups, tech giants, and successful corporations first before they look inside the walls of our lecture theatres and labs. But the pressure of financial constraint creates the perfect opportunity to reinvent how we do things. And so instead of freezing learning budgets, why not get ever more creative in how we approach learning and use those budgets? This sector has so much creativity to offer, but freezing those budgets will simply stunt it and keep us stuck.
It’s time to reinvent how we learn, how we navigate moments of crisis in higher education, and how we make strategic choices in the budgets that we protect and nurture through challenging moments. So please, don’t let training and learning be the budget that you cut.
How we’re trying to help at Pickle Jar and ContentEd+
Alongside our consultancy work to support the sector in making efficient and effective approaches to content management, we also deliver a lot of training and learning opportunites. We do this through bespoke workshops, but also through the ContentEd conference and community. We want to lower the price for education institutions in being able to access high quality training at scale. And so we have recently completely transformed our ContentEd+ offer, introducing a freemium membership model. We have also slashed the price of access to the premium ContentEd+ platform, significantly expanded the resources available through it, and made it available to unlimited members of staff for a single annual institutional subscription of just £1.999 (+ VAT in the UK) per year. Institutions that join by 30 November 2024 get an additional £500 discount off their subscription fee.
Learn more about ContentEd+ membership and create greater efficiencies and impact through your organisation’s marketing, communications and content management.