HR Metrics Cheat Sheet for Employee Training and Development

Personnel management is an exciting and diverse field to operate in. As it becomes increasingly digitized, there are more tools and more data available to optimize HR processes. In this blog series, we’ll get to the bottom of this.

As a software company servicing the HR sector, this evolution opens new doors. You probably have a lot of valuable user data, perhaps locked away in a dark corner of your platform? Then it’s time to shed some light on it! How can your SaaS platform address the reporting needs of the HR market?

To answer that question, we started this series of cheat sheets. They aim to give you an overview of the key metrics in HR, and a guide to employ them in everyday business.

In our last 2 posts, we already covered staffing metrics and recruitment metrics for HR. This blogpost will discuss a third domain in HR: training & development.

This article will be interesting for you if you’re involved in processes or tools that apply to the following HR tasks.

• Employee training & education
• Career development
• Coaching

‍

Why measure the efficiency of employee training?

68% of employees claim that training & development is the most important company policy. Giving your employees proper training has positive effects. Not only for the employees, but also from the business side.

Well-trained employees are more productive and have a sense of growth. The company allows them to grow their skill set, and climb up the career ladder. But what if your training efforts are not having the desired effect? This statistic shows the other side of the coin: the total loss to a business from ineffective training is a staggering $13,500 per employee.

But no problem goes without a solution. With the right metrics, any company can track the efficiency of their training efforts. This is also how new HR software can really stand out from the competition. This kind of reporting & insights are of great value to HR, and can be offered quite easily through embedded dashboards.

HR metrics cheat sheet for training & development

Now, which metrics are ‘the right metrics’? The truth is: it heavily depends. Every company has different goals and measures different results. However, there are some key training figures that can be relevant to any HR professional out there.

Below, we've listed some of those key metrics as a source of inspiration. It will help you to define more specific metrics that align to your business goals.

• Assessment score
• Total hours of training followed
• Training expenses
• Training effectiveness index

If you want to dive deeper into your HR recruitment metrics, you can drill down into specific dimensions, and plot them on a bar chart, line chart and other visualizations. Here are a few examples of interesting dimensions.

• By skill type
• By employee
• By course
• Evolution over time

A word of explanation on some of the metrics:

• Assessment score: When you train employees, try to evaluate their performance on a specific field in the form of a numerical ‘score’. In many cases, regular assessment tests are used to score an employee’s progress on different skills. This helps you evaluate their knowledge level before and after training sessions.
• Training Effectiveness Index: This is a numerical value that expresses how effective your training activities are, compared to the goal you’re trying to achieve. This index will look different for almost any company, but the basic idea is the same. Define the parameters that influence the goal attainment, and calculate the index based on these parameters.

A KPI dashboard for training & development

The KPIs discussed above offer HR managers a framework to better evaluate the company’s training policy. But how do you present all of that information visually?

This is where a dashboarding tool comes in handy. You can present all the KPIs of a company in 1 dashboard, which allows for further drill-down on a specific employee, or the assessment of a specific training session.

Those who offer a platform for training & development can even embed dashboards into their own environment. The reports will be integrally part of your own application.

To catch a glimpse of an example dashboard, check out the embedded dashboard on training activities for a fictional company below.

How do you offer learning and development insights to your HR platform users? If you're interested in similar HR example dashboards for your software, get in touch with our product experts to discuss your use case.