What happens when government entities and privates businesses combine to create top tier talent? Welcome to the world of workforce development!
This guide covers what workforce development involves, how funding models differ across different countries, and steps to launch a program. It also shows how a TMS helps you manage budgets, schedules, and reporting.
What is workforce development?
Workforce development is a coordinated mix of education, training, and support services. It helps people gain the skills to get and keep good jobs, and it helps employers find the talent they need.
According to the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals Governments use workforce development programs to help people enter employment, develop new skills, and respond to changes in the labor market, while businesses use them to build the capabilities they need to remain productive and competitive.
One can call workforce development programs a synergetic relationship between the private and public sectors given that their goals are closely connected.
For example, a manufacturing firm struggling to find technicians with a specific skill set may have a skills gap to address new projects. In response, the government seeks to improve employment by providing incentives to businesses, organizations, and training centers to provide relevant training.
Government-supported workforce development can take many forms including:
- Government funding of apprenticeship programs
- Municipal or local government organization investment in specific industries or trades in a region
- Government incentives to private entities to support specialized training for upskilling, reskilling or cross-skilling initiatives
There is no single model that works everywhere.
The OECD’s recent review of vocational education and training across nine countries found substantial differences in governance, funding, providers, and the balance between classroom and work-based learning.
But what these programs have in common is the need to turn government policy objectives into actual learning activity, and in turn into real business impact. That sounds straightforward until you have hundreds or thousands of learners, multiple training providers, limited budgets, and a requirement to demonstrate results.
Government Funding: the Foundation of All Workforce Development Programs
For organizations running these programs, there’s a considerable practical challenge that goes far beyond simply “spending the funds.”
Funding may come with specific conditions such as delivering training within a particular timeframe. Participants may be spread across locations, employers, or different stages of a program. And there’s always the question of whether the training provided a positive investment for the organization.
That matters because training can deliver a considerable return of training investment.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) cites UK research showing returns to businesses of between 5% and 25% from apprenticeship programs, depending on the sector. A similar review of US apprenticeship programs across five states revealed $27 in return for every $1 of government investment.
Because of monetary incentives, legal restrictions of payouts, and the documentation required for skills programs, management of funds and F2F sessions becomes critical for businesses operating within a workforce development scheme.
The demand for new skills development
Skills gaps across industries and businesses in need of top tier talent have incentivized workforce development programs.
A workforce development program might have an ambitious objective such as improving employability across a specific demographic, addressing a regional skills shortage, or supporting a sector through technological change (as we’re seeing right now with AI). None of those objectives happen simply because funding has been allocated. People need to learn a skills, practice it, and eventually apply it.
For businesses, the same principle applies. Upskilling an existing employee can close a skills gap without requiring a new hire, which is often a more cost-effective solution. One estimate by SHRM found that hiring new employees can cost as much as $4,700 while training on new skills costs around $3,000.
Reskilling can help someone move into a different role when their existing job is changing in light of new technologies, policies, or business priorities.
Apprenticeships and other work-based programs can create a pipeline of people with skills that are difficult to find externally, ensuring organizations always have access to the skills they need.
For instance, the UK’s new employer-led work experience program, Opening Shift, is set to attract 100,000 young people into the retail sector by 2029.
The complexity of workforce development programs
Needless, to say upskilling, reskilling and cross-skilling all play a vital role in ensuring current and incoming workforces have the most up-to-date and in demand talent.
As a result of this demand, this makes building training budgets particularly important. Money allocated to workforce development needs to translate into appropriate training that will actually move the needle, not just training that happens to be available.
Scheduling is another practical issue, particularly when programs include instructor-led training (ILT) or other hands-on learning. A classroom session might require an subject matter expert or facilitator, a training venue, equipment, and a group of learners to be available at the same time. Multiply that across several locations, and suddenly a relatively simple training program becomes a logistical challenge for in-house coordinators.
Workforce development programs thus must balance between in-person skills delivery while managing funds provided by governments. This balance between instruction and “monetary scrutiny” forces training managers and chief learning officers alike to focus on monitor scheduling and training budgets on spreadsheets.
As a result of this routine form of training administration, training teams have begun investing in a dedicated Training Management Systems (TMS) to handle all parts of the training process: from scheduling ILT seminars to ensuring workforce training budgets are secured and dispersed properly.
The biggest benefit among many for using a training management system for F2F skills development with a workforce scheme is that it allows training teams to reduce routine, time consuming admin work reliant on an increasingly complicated network of databases.
Government-supported workforce development around the world
As the European Training Foundation notes, skills development increasingly requires collaboration between governments, employers, and education providers, alongside opportunities for people to continue learning throughout their working lives.
But the specifics of government-supported workforce development vary considerably between countries. The underlying challenge is familiar, though: governments want organizations to invest in skills, while organizations need a practical way to use that investment effectively.
FUNDAE in Spain
Spain’s system for professional training includes financial support for companies that train their employees. FUNDAE explains that businesses can receive training credit, applied through reductions in their Social Security payments, based on their previous professional training contributions and workforce size. Smaller organizations receive a higher percentage of available credit.
Companies can organize training themselves or outsource training organization to an external entity if they don’t have the in-house expertise.
The Apprenticeship Levy in the UK
In the UK, employers with an annual pay bill above £3 million are generally required to pay the Apprenticeship Levy at 0.5% of their annual pay bill. Levy-paying employers can use their apprenticeship service account to fund apprenticeship training and assessment.
The rules have also changed recently. From August 2026, funds entering levy accounts are subject to a 12-month expiry period, while employers can transfer up to 50% of their levy funds to other businesses. If organizations don’t have a clear view of upcoming apprenticeships, available funds, and training delivery, money can become difficult to use effectively.
The UK’s workforce development landscape also extends beyond publicly funded apprenticeships. Many organizations invest in private training and continuing professional development (CPD), with some providers offering CPD-accredited courses. This gives employers another consideration when managing training at scale: tracking participation, learning hours, and accreditation across different providers.
B-BBEE in South Africa
South Africa’s Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) framework includes skills development as one of the areas used to measure an organization’s contribution to economic transformation.
Skills development is a priority element of B-BBEE, which means organizations need to meet a minimum threshold for skills development activity or risk having their overall B-BBEE recognition level reduced. This gives businesses a strong incentive to invest in qualifying training and development, and to keep accurate records of that activity.
The emphasis of B-BBEE is not simply on spending money. The framework covers investment in skills and training for black people, including both employed and unemployed learners.
Canada’s 1% Act
Canada provides a particularly clear example of regulation being used to encourage employer investment in skills, although the 1% training requirement applies in Québec rather than across the whole country.
Under Québec’s Workforce Skills Development and Recognition Fund (informally known as the 1% Act), employers whose payroll exceeds the threshold set by regulation must allocate at least 1% of their total payroll to eligible training expenditure.
Eligible expenditure can include training from recognized educational institutions and training organizations, as well as certain internal training activities and the assessment of training needs.
Managing these four or other similar workforce development schemes isn’t the easiest, especially when you’re just starting.
Check out our recommendations for managing your apprenticeship program
4 Steps to start a workforce development program
The temptation with any funded training program is to start with the courses…. But it’s almost always smarter to start with the challenge the training is supposed to solve, whether that’s upskilling across an entire industry, equipping a demographic group with the skills they need to enter the workforce, or developing specific skills to support a regional need.
1. Begin with a training needs analysis
A training needs analysis (TNA) helps identify the gap between the skills people have and the skills they need. It should consider the organization’s objectives, the roles involved, current capabilities, and the changes likely to affect those roles.
For a public workforce program, this might mean looking at factors such as regional employment data, employer requirements, and emerging occupations. For an individual organization, it could involve analyzing performance, new technology, or compliance requirements.
The important thing is to avoid treating training as the default answer to every problem without probing further into the underlying issue. Sometimes a skills gap really does require training, but sometimes the issue is poor process, insufficient resources, or unclear expectations.
Once the genuine training needs are clear, the organization can decide what learning intervention makes sense.
2. Focus on the organization and the training ROI
Training is an investment, even when the program is supported by government funding.
That doesn’t mean every course needs a neat training ROI figure attached to it. Some outcomes are easier to measure than others, such as fewer errors from a technical program, improved internal promotion from a leadership program or increased employment rates from an employability initiative.
A useful training ROI process begins with the organization’s objectives. What needs to change? Which people need to change their skills or behaviors? What evidence would show that the change happened?
From there, training teams can track measures such as course completion, skills gained, and application of learning. Where appropriate, these can be connected to wider business or program outcomes to show the full extent of the training impact.
This also makes it easier to identify programs that aren’t working. That’s also valuable information. Continuing to spend a training budget on a program simply because it’s been running for years isn’t a sensible workforce development strategy, and cutting underperforming programs means that budget can be reallocated elsewhere.
3. Plan the training and skills program rollout
Once training needs and expected outcomes have been established, the next question is what to deliver and when.
This is where upskilling and reskilling programs can become particularly useful. Not every learner needs the same intervention. Some may need a short skills workshop, some may need quick microlearning modules, while others might need a longer pathway involving several courses, hands-on training, and formal assessment.
Each training program should be specific to the type of training and manner of how the skills will be applied. For example, an organization addressing a shortage of skilled technicians might combine ILT sessions with hands-on workshops and supervised workplace experience. Someone moving into a digital role might need a different combination of technical training, coaching, and hands-on practice.
Instructor-led training deserves particular attention. ILT remains important when learners need to practice physical tasks, work through complex scenarios with an expert, or receive immediate feedback.
In fact, some training programs rely purely on face-to-face training to transfer skills expertise from trainer-to-learner, simply because it’s the preferred method by both.
To no surprise, ILT is also common in vocational and work-based learning, where knowledge acquisition combined with “learning-by-doing” form integral parts of the process as part of the training process.
4. Iterate and improve your training experiences
Once a session wraps, the real work starts. Pull the numbers from each individual session: attendance, completion, assessment scores, and learner feedback. One workshop that runs long or loses people halfway through will stay invisible in a quarterly average, but it shows up fast at the session level. I’d fix those small things first, because they add up.
Then look at cost per learner next to skill progression. For example, if an hands-on training course costs $400 a head and learners barely move between pre- and post-assessment, that’s a problem worth knowing about to training coordinator.
Analyze the learning analytics within your course scheduling system to understand where resourcing may be falling behind as potential causes to poor learning experience.
Training operations reports fill in the rest, showing which rooms, instructors, materials, and licenses each session used up. Compare those against outcomes, cut what isn’t pulling its weight, and run the next round with the changes in place.
Managing workforce development with Training Orchestra
Training management software gives training organizations a central place to manage every critical piece of information for workforce development initiative and all the training programs within it.
With Training Orchestra, teams can manage training budgets, schedules, resources, instructors, participants, and training sessions from one system. That is particularly useful when programs involve a significant amount of instructor-led training, and need to coordinate activity across different locations or cohorts.
For example, a training team could use a training management system in order to:
- Plan training sessions around instructor and room availability
- Track training costs against available budgets
- Manage external training providers and instructors
- Keep records of attendance and completion
- Monitor planned versus actual training activity
The value is not just having all this information in one place but also being able to see how different parts of the program affect one another.
If an instructor is unavailable, what sessions are affected? If a cohort is moved, what happens to the room booking? If the training budget is being used faster than expected, why?
These questions become much harder to answer when information is scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and separate systems.
For organizations running government-supported workforce development, that visibility also makes reporting on training easier. Teams can see who attended which course, what it cost, and what’s left to be delivered.
Workforce Development Training Management, Simplified
Planning, scheduling, and reporting on workforce development training, especially if it used ILT/vILT and blended learning, can be a complex endeavor even with the best team.
Training Orchestra brings your entire workforce development operation into one centralized platform without the need for relying on calendars or spreadsheets.
As the best training management system designed for government and organizational training, Training Orchestra simplifies instructor-led scheduling, automates administrative tasks, and tracks budgets so your team spends less time on administrative logistics.
Book a demo and see how much of your training budget you can recover.
