News story

IT training top 50 providers published

Learning NewsLPI (Learning and Performance Institute)

IT Training magazine's IT Skills Research Programme has just published its table of the Top 50 IT training providers.

Learning Tree International tops the list (£38m) with QA (£35m), KnowledgePool (£35m), SAP (£30m) and IBM Learning Services (£29m) featuring the as the top 5 guns.

The Top 5 public course providers were Learning Tree (33,000 delegates), QA (27,000), KnowledgePool (25,500), SAP (19,500) and Parity Training (19,000).

The Top 5 Certification trainers were QA, Parity Training, Thomson NETg/Wave, Global Knowledge and Informatics Group (UK).

The top 5 e-Learning providers were Thomson NETg/Wave (£18.5m), SmartForce (£16m), Vega Group (£5m), IBM Learning Services (£3.5m) and KnowledgePool (£3m).

The top 5 project trainers were KnowledgePool (£25.5m), DACG (£12m), Parity Training (£11.5m), Spring IT Training (£9m) and QA (£8.5m).

This year, it has restricted the revenues to training delivered in the UK, and has again excluded organisations whose revenue is derived principally from publicly funded training or from military/defence-specific IT training and training franchises whose revenues consist only of royalties and training brokers/portals.

Nobody is quite sure how large the commercial IT training market is in the UK. But IT Skills Research estimate that is is between £500m and £550m this year. This figure covers training paid for by employers or bought by self-employed IT professionals. However, it does exclude publicly funded schemes (such as the Individual Learning Account) aimed at those not currently in work.

It is estimated that about 20 per cent of the total figure is spent on end-user training, with the remainder spent on training for IT professionals.

An alternative breakdown is that last year £380m (76%) is ILT; £55m (11%) is e-Learning and blended learning; £35m (7%) on books and materials; £25m (5%) on CBT; and £5m (1%) on videos.

Further information can be found in the IITT Web site Members Area under 'Research - Top 50 IT training providers'.