Coaching gets a boost

Quote from the Evening Standard which I read when I'm in London....

"Nine out of 10 organisations are now using coaching to help boost staff performance , despite a cut in budgets for training . Line managers are responsible for coaching in 6 out of 10 cases according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Developemnt's annual survey. , Taking the tempaerature of coaching which found a sharp increases in the use of this training tool. Previous surveys found that only seven in 10 firms were using coaching.
Commenting on whether employers were turning to coaching as an alternative to classroom based training , CIPD spokesman said
"there are lots of good reasons to question the value of classroom based training because there is the issue that it's high profile and expensive in difficult ecomnomic times. Coaching can be costly , but once you have got coaching resources in place, it's relatively cheap to keep going "
My quick response is Line mangers should be coaching, it's part of their job! I dsagree that coaching is costly , for example training a group of line managers for 2-3 half days days and combining this with a 4 month on-line interactive coaching programme would be less than £300 per per person! It's all about the flexibilty of the supplier !!