Why training spend rose, and two ways of defining the idea

The background is a changing workplace. The idea of a job for life has thinned, flexible hiring has widened, and employment is described as more self-centered than loyal to an organization. In a digital economy, labor is managed with self-management as a base; organization and communication are becoming more horizontal and flexible; production runs many varieties in smaller lots and cuts inventory through just-in-time work; selling is less a matter of sitting close to a mass market, and more a matter of marketing fitted to a person with the help of big data and artificial intelligence. At the same time, the cost of keeping people trained in a changing setting is rising, product life cycles have shortened so that a traditional firm structure is less obviously needed, and hiring specialists asks for a higher level of education and training. Firms, the account argues, have to develop their people more quickly and put a satisfactory training path in place.

A 2021 Statista series on average spend on workplace training per employee worldwide from 2008 to 2019 is cited for the claim that firms globally have been raising that spend. The figure is given as 1,068 dollars in 2008 and 1,308 dollars in 2019, a rise of about 22 percent. Those years are left as they are. Product life cycles, once relatively long — a good is introduced, finds a public, then slowly leaves the market as a rival appears or the setting changes — have, especially around information-technology goods, often become short enough that a new item is soon a previous version. The familiar stages of development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline are named.

In Korea, youth unemployment is described as high, while firms at the same time lack the specialists they need. A graph from the Korea Economic Research Institute on a future-industry workforce shortage is mentioned, and similar reports from other agencies are noted. A 27 January 2019 article in the Seoul Economic Daily, looking ahead to 2022, put the need for Fourth Revolution talent in Korea at 57,700 and the shortfall at 31,800. An 11 August 2020 piece in the Hankook Ilbo is cited on a serious shortage of Fourth Industrial Revolution staff, with a warning that in five years the country could fall behind China in every field. A 27 July 2020 report in the Kyunghyang Shinmun put the share of small and medium firms facing a labor shortage at 54.6 percent, and said three in ten new hires left within a year. A 16 November 2020 Maeil Business piece, drawing on Hunet’s 2020 survey of corporate education, reported that 63 percent of companies said they would expand e-learning. Each of those reports is left in its own year.

Two definitions are set side by side. Michael Marquardt’s systems view treats a learning organization as systematic, accelerated learning accomplished by the organization as a whole rather than by individual members alone, turning data into valuable knowledge and raising long-term adaptive capacity — and, as the Korean wording has it, long-term competitiveness. Jack Horgen’s competitiveness view treats a learning organization as one with a vision of tomorrow, in which the people who make it up are not simply trained in a limiting, prescriptive way to meet the organization’s ends, but for a more expanded role. Other approaches are named around customers and service quality, around teams, around opportunities and tools for education, and around methods and management. What is treated as important is that a firm becomes a learning organization by developing its people, and that, among the many definitions, firms center on grasping a customer’s needs and meeting them.

What such an organization is said to do, and what still constrains Korea

A learning organization, in this account, can be a firm, a professional group, a university, a school, a city, or a country — any organization, whatever its size or the character of its people, that wants to raise performance through learning. It is said to give people a chance to unfold their potential and to encourage that; to share a vision of the future of the people and of the organization, and to stir new challenges; to integrate work and learning, and to inspire a continuous qualitative advance; to plan education and training according to talent; to respect each person’s way of learning and to strengthen everyone’s competitiveness; to create and widen new educational opportunities with the latest data and technique; to respond actively to broad environmental and social needs, and to encourage its people to do the same; and to keep learning and retraining in order to remain an innovative, vigorous firm.

For Korea the physical setting is described as relatively ready. Information-technology infrastructure is strong — the country is often called an IT power — and new technique and information are picked up quickly, so many firms already have the physical conditions for becoming a learning organization. What remains difficult is a rigid organizational culture and a workplace that puts a heavy weight on loyalty, which sit poorly with the standard being described, and working hours that, among OECD countries, are already long enough that additional education or training is likely to feel fatiguing. Those constraints are named as work still to be done. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A Korean discussion of the learning organization, citing a 2021 Statista series on workplace-training spend from 2008 to 2019, definitions by Marquardt and Horgen, and Korean press reports from 2019 and 2020.

Last updated: 14 November 2026