Bedlam in Belgium - credit crunch hits training budgets

I'm working in a lovely Belgian castle this week with a group of buyers from the travel industry. It has been both fascinating and worrying to hear first hand about the impact of the, so called, credit crunch on business travel. It seems that business across the world is cutting travel to save costs.

Even more worrying it seems that training is another victim of the crunch. Other organisations scheduled to be here this week have cancelled leaving the venue under utilised. I cannot understand why on earth organisations cut training and therefore the future effectiveness of their people in difficult times? Our event survived because it was deemed that it would be too expensive to cancel - perhaps the signal should have been,

In difficult times, the last thing we will cut will be investment in employee development