By Holly MacDonald

This is a common time of year for HR or training departments to assess their performance and/or set their metrics for the upcoming year.  Both Training Mag and ASTD produce annual benchmarking reports. There are some traditional measures of success for training, and some that are emerging.

• $ spend on training per employee
• Hours of  training per employee
• % of payroll

While these measure expenditure and activity, they are not particularly great measures of success.  When you start to dig deeper on any of the items, you’ll notice that they are not terribly helpful.  Assessing how much you spend per employee uses the total amount that is allocated in training expenses divided by all employees.  This provides an average amount.  You may have spent a significant amount of money on executive education, but little on entry-level employees.   Your total may say you’ve spent $500 per employee, but it isn’t an actual amount per employee.

Hours of training per employee isn’t a quality measure. You could spend numerous hours on bad training which could prove to be a problem, not a success measure!  We call it “bums in seats”.  ‘Nuff said?

Percentage of payroll – this tells you to some degree how much you value training as it shows what you invest in your employees.  It does not tell you if your investment is effective (or efficient).  Quantity, not quality.

The challenge is, when benchmarking, you have to generalize.  You’ll need to decide if benchmarking is valuable to your organization or not. For example, if you are having to fight hard to attract outside talent or investors, then it is something that you should do.

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Holly MacDonald is an independent consultant with well over 15 years of experience in the learning & development field.  Holly is a bit of a techno-geek and can often be found playing online.  When she steps away from her computer, she spends time outside: hiking, kayaking, gardening and of course walking the dog.  She lives on Saltspring Island and is a leader in the live/work revolution.