At the start of each year, industry analysts and forecasters work hard to predict how various markets are going to change for their respective businesses. And the L&D industry is no different. Last month John Philpott, chief economist at the CIPD, predicted a major slowdown in the UK economy throughout this year and even possibly into 2009.

Let’s look at some of the figures. Since 2003, large international training companies have experienced their highest growth ever, with annual growth rates of more than 20 per cent not uncommon. Consolidations and acquisitions of training companies have been frequent and the outsourcing sector has seen annual growth exceeding 20 per cent. The finance sector has undergone some of the strongest growth, with compliance programmes driving the need for training new entrants and CPD being mandatory for many existing employees.

More recently, though, spending on corporate L&D has begun to slow, with the rate of growth falling to just six per cent last year.

The training market in the USA reached more than $130bn in 2007 and the global training industry is now approaching $500bn; the biggest growth is in Europe ($80bn), China ($72bn) and Russia ($22bn).

So what might this possible slump mean to the L&D specialist? As more and more products are now technology-orientated, the need for training on how to use, maintain or service them will continue to grow. Of course, customer training has been around for a long time but the biggest change is that learning and marketing functions are becoming much more adept at documenting training for legal purposes.

Traditionally, L&D practitioners have thought of learning services as employee-centric. The reality is that many companies spend more money on training customers than they do their employees, a fact that has been hidden because the costs are often part of marketing budgets.

These bleak economic predictions may herald an effect on L&D, but not necessarily a negative one.

The drive by senior management to improve the bottom line, and transform how they source and manage talent, may lead to much more integrated HR, L&D and finance functions. Dissatisfaction with how we use a decentralised approach to effectively recruit, manage, retain and develop talent is growing, and the solution requires all of the functional areas in the human capital management process to come together to find creative alternatives.

Collaboration and telecommunications technologies allow us to have employees anywhere in the world, and many companies are solving their talent problems by going global and getting skilled labour wherever it is available. This international approach involves the integrated business processes of HR, IT, finance and L&D – and this, along with the use of Web 2.0 methodologies and synchronous and asynchronous delivery tools, will affect how employees and customers learn.

All these predictions for the future are just that: predictions. But they do indicate that L&D professionals need to broaden their skills and work closely with other company functions to guarantee that organisations survive these inevitable periods of economic downturn.