Everything You Need to Know About Employee Training and Development KPIs

HR Consultancy
May 10, 2023

To grow, companies need to upskill their employees, from juniors to seniors to managers. To do that, they need to provide training and development opportunities.

This can be in the form of individual courses or team-wide training or a combination of the two.

But how do you, as an HR executive or business owner, measure the impact training has on your company?

The answer is by measuring training and development KPIs. These indicators show you how effective your training was and if it was worth the investment.

If you’ve already conducted training or a course for your team and need to know the impact of that course, you can use these training KPIs as well.

In this article, we’ll be covering the top KPIs for training and development a business should measure to ensure their training budget is well spent.

What are training KPIs?

KPIs stand for key performance indicators. They help you measure the impact of an event or activity.

This means that training KPIs are indicators that measure how effective–or ineffective–a training program or course is.

Your training programs and plans should be accounted for in your company’s annual HR budget.

Before deciding what type of training you’ll provide, it’s important to determine the goals of that training in advance. Set clear expectations of what you want employees to achieve with this course and how they can use it in their jobs.

Why do you need KPIs for training and development?

Businesses use training KPIs and metrics for several reasons. These include:

  1. Reviewing learners’ progress.
  2. Measuring how effective a training program or course was. This means reviewing how it helped employees speed up workflow, overcome certain obstacles, save time,…etc.
  3. Reviewing the level of employee engagement with the training program.
  4. Improving certain employee skills.
  5. Reviewing employee feedback of the training program and experience.
  6. Seeing whether you’ve achieved the results you sought to achieve before implementing the training.

8 KPIs for training and development to measure

Now, let’s look at the top training and development KPIs you should measure after each training or course.

1)    Training attendance

This training metric looks at the average attendance rate of your employees in the training you’ve provided.

Assuming it’s not a mandatory training, the attendance metric will show you:

  • How many employees signed up for the training.
  • How many of those who signed up attended the course.
  • How many attended the course in full, how many attended a few sessions, and how many did not attend at all (despite signing up for it).

This will help you determine if your training had a good or bad turnout. If you get a poor turnout, the next step would be to find out why employees didn’t attend.

This training KPI also helps you see if attendance declines as the program or course continues.

For example, if training begins with 20 people, but by the third or fourth session, the number drops to 10 or less. This indicates that training isn’t effective or interesting or both.

 

2)    Level of completion 

The level of training completion KPI builds on the attendance metric. It shows you the percentage of employees who:

  • Completed the training till the end.
  • Completed 25%, 50%, and 75% of the training.

The next step is to find out why some employees did not complete the training.

  • Was it because the timing wasn’t suitable for them? (For example, it was during working hours and they had time-based deliverables)
  • Were they uninterested in the training to begin with?
  • Was it not relevant to them?
  • Did they already know this information?
  • Was the instructor or material (or both) too difficult for them?

If you’re providing mandatory training, the level of completion rate should be 100%. If it isn’t, you need to find out why ASAP.

 

3)    Average time to completion 

Another important KPI for training and development is the average completion time. It measures how long it took each employee, or team or group of employees, to start and complete the training.

It can be an indicator of how easy or difficult the training is.

The average time to completion should be measured when you’re offering or paying for an online course. If it’s taking employees to long to complete the course, you need to find out why.

 

4)    Training pass and fail rates 

This training metric helps you determine the quality of the training and the level of knowledge your employees gained.

To measure the training’s pass and fail rates, you–or the instructor–can conduct a quiz in the final session of the training and review employees’ answers.

Employees or teams/branches/departments with a high success or pass rate are likely to be receiving good training.

On the other hand, employees, teams, branches, or departments with a high fail rate aren’t getting good-quality training. Alternatively, it may have been too difficult for them.

Either way, you’ll need to pinpoint the reasons behind the high fail rate and discuss them with the training manager and instructor.

It’s worth mentioning that this training KPI can also be used to determine the ease or difficulty of training program.

So, if you get a really high pass rate, it may be that the training was too easy. Whereas if you get a high fail rate, the training was difficult for your employees.

 

5)    Level of impact on job performance 

The main reason businesses provide training is to improve their employees’ work performance by enhancing their skills.

Naturally, an important KPI for training and development pertains to how the training has affected employees and their jobs.

How you measure this metric will differ from one team or department to another.

  1. First, you need to clarify what the training sought to improve.
  2. Second, you need to determine what productivity means for your employees.
  3. Then, find out if the training has achieved the outcomes it was meant to achieve.

Did it help employees save time uploading data? Did it help them improve their language proficiency? Did it help them close more deals per day or week or month?

Review each employee’s and each team’s performance before and after the training.

 

6)    Learner retention rate 

The learner retention rate is an important KPI for training and development because it looks at:

  • How your employees received the information
  • How much they remember from it
  • How much knowledge they gained from the training

The best way to measure the learner retention rate is to create a quiz after the course or training is over.

Depending on the course itself, it can be a multiple-choice quiz or a more detailed quiz with answers employees have to write themselves.

However, if the training was designed to support a specific function or overcome a problem, you’ll have to measure the learner retention rate in a different way.

For example, if you provide training to developers and coders, you’ll have to measure the impact of the training based on their work. This can mean measuring the number of bugs that emerge in the projects they’re working on.

 

7)    Learner satisfaction rate 

An often-overlooked training metric is the learner satisfaction rate.

Training is about giving employees materials and skills that help them improve both professionally and, to a degree, personally.

However, if employees feel dissatisfied with your courses or training programs, they’re more likely to skip these sessions and view them as a waste of their time.

You can measure learner satisfaction rate by:

  • Conducting a post-training survey
  • Creating a form asking for opinions and recommendations (similar to a survey)
  • Asking employees what they learnt
  • Seeing the impact of the training on their jobs

 

8)    Training ROI 

Though we saved this for last, your training’s return on investment (ROI) is one of the important KPIs for training and development.

Companies use ROI to measure the results and benefits of various business operations and investments. Some can be financial investments, while others may be time-based investments or something else.

Whenever a company invests in training, it spends money and time. Naturally, the company needs to know if this investment had positive results.

While you may want to review how much you spent on training and if it positively affected the company’s profits, it can be tricky to do so.

That’s why when measuring training ROI, you need to consider a few things:

  1. What are the goals you aim to achieve with this training program or these courses?
  2. Decide who will give the training. Is it going to be in-house? From a training service provider? Or is it an online course?
  3. After employees complete the sessions, see if those goals were achieved.

 

Wrapping it up

Providing your employees with training and development opportunities offers many business benefits.

Chief among those benefits are higher employee retention and lower employee turnover. In addition, by investing in your employees and their skills, they can improve workflow, operations, and business performance. It also increases employee engagement.

It’s worth highlighting that when it comes to training and development in business, having a high or even 100% completion rate doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good course or that employees benefited from it.

So, when you review the completion rate, among other metrics on this list, you need to know what you’re trying to measure and achieve with this metric.

If you need help figuring out your teams’ needs, or if you’re looking for an HR training service provider, get in touch with Tawzef. Our team will guide you in upskilling your employees and improving your operations.

 

This article is part of a series on HR KPIs and metrics for businesses. Read the other articles in this series:

–        How to Create a Women-Inclusive Compensation & Benefits Strategy

–       5 KPIs for compensation and benefits policy

–        What Are the Most Important Recruiting KPIs?

 

 

 

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