One of the other major difficulties L&D must surmount is ensuring employees are supported and given the time to learn. This won't be easy with less people expected to do more work in many organisations. Attending a one-off two-day course and then hurriedly returning to the workplace to play catch-up with the day job is not conducive to effective learning and gives the individual no time to reflect on how the new skills and knowledge can be applied.

The answer lies in taking a blended approach which combines a number of different learning components, offering more flexibility for both the learner and the employer.

Sadly, blended learning is still both underestimated and often misunderstood by employers thinking it means simply combining face-to-face training with online learning and hoping something sensible comes out at the end.

When thought through properly though, blended learning adds a huge amount of value to the learning and can help L&D to extend its reach, its capacity and its control by shifting and reducing the emphasis on event based activities.

Blended learning training can be made up of a number of components from online and classroom-based learning to discussion forums and action learning sets, asynchronous virtual workshops, research, work-based assignments and work-related projects. The crucial factor is making sure these elements are joined together by a robust framework that draws in everyone involved in the learning process.

As it becomes less feasible to expect an employee to take five days out of the office for a training course, the blended approach will also help companies make a fundamental shift in their approach to training over the coming years, which is to stop thinking about it as a single or group of events but rather see it as a longer term process.

If a one-day development course is followed up with online study and then combined with a work-based assignment there is far more chance of it being effective and memorable as each piece of activity will reinforce the previous piece of learning. Each of these components can then be effectively measured in terms of its impact.

While the economic climate means L&D has to ensure any learning is meaningful to the business, the training also has to to be relevant for the learner if it is to be effective. Employees must feel supported in their learning and managers need to set it in the context of their personal development post review/appraisal development, or their continuing professional development (CPD) plans. Although there will always be guidelines, CPD is largely self-governing and there is a danger that unless the organisation takes it seriously, nor will the individual.

Line managers need to set targets and enforce their employees to be disciplined in their approach to learning as well as approving, validating or providing feedback on the learning that has been carried out.

In order for employers to keep their competitive edge for when the tide turns, and retain staff, it's worth investing in your workforce now.

TDG, one of Europe's leading supply chain management companies, needed a cost-effective way of ensuring its training reached the widest audience within the organisation and which also linked it to organisational effectiveness. Traditional training courses were only reaching a small audience, chiefly because not all sites could afford the budget or time to release people to travel to Manchester where the training took place. It wanted to explore whether the use of blended learning could help extend the audience for its courses and make training a more meaningful process so turned to learning and knowledge e-solutions provider LRI.

LRI created an intranet-based online academy featuring a suite of 60 blended and e-learning courses aimed at supervisory and management level. TDG started with a licence for 500 people and quickly extended this to 750. Currently 600 people are using the academy and the most popular subjects for study include budgeting and decision-making, as well as IT courses.

HR director Annette Capper explains that the academy is directly linked to the company's performance assessment process. Before an employee registers for the academy and a particular course, it has to be approved by their line manager who must fill in documentation saying it has been identified as part of their performance assessment.

The popularity of the TDG Academy has encouraged TDG to evolve its L&D offering despite the economic climate by adding accredited Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) qualifications. The six-month blended programme is already over-subscribed and so the plan is to run the programme twice a year.

Employees can access the academy at any time and many are happy to study in their own time, says Capper. The flexibility of the blended programme means they only have to be released from their site for three days in six months. 

Capper says that the business Benefits include more motivated employees, increased skill levels and the academy has also helped to instil a desire for learning within the workforce. Crucially though, she says it has brought the performance assessment process "to life".

"That's the Holy Grail in learning and development," she says. "Performance assessment is no longer something that's done once a year and then sits on the shelf – it's on the line manager's desk and is regularly revisited. Our approach has made it a meaningful process."

While she says it is difficult to measure the effect of the academy on the organisation's bottom line, she has no doubt that it is having a positive impact on the business. "For instance, budgeting is consistently in the top three courses and if people have a better understanding of what their budgets mean they'll be better at managing them," she says, and adds: "This [the academy] has been one of the most effective uses of a training budget and it has enabled us to offer an extended level of L&D in the current climate. Employees read the press and know other companies aren't doing any training at all while they can see that isn't the case at their company."