Effects of training on business results1

Currently, there is general agreement about the importance of training as a tool to help companies in the development of sustainable competitive advantages based on their human resources. However, the investment of companies in training activities is still very low. Among other reasons, that is due to the fact that they do not evaluate the effects of training on performance and therefore they do not know its economic impact for the company. There is also a lack of academic research analysing that issue, mainly at the empirical level. This paper studies empirically the effects of training on performance (effectiveness and profitability) using a sample of 457 European SMEs (including Spanish companies).1 Our results show some evidence of significant relationships between training and performance.