My colleague, Tom Whelan, recently wrote a blog arguing that training hours are obsolete. While I agree with many of his points, I have to disagree with his conclusion; learning hours still hold value as a metric of evaluation and should be considered in the determination of training program effectiveness.
Briefly, Tom criticizes learning hours as a proxy for the number of learners served (i.e., “butts in seats”) and insightfully points to missing contextual information that could, when hours are considered as the sole gauge of learning effectiveness, obscure important insights into the mechanisms driving (or prohibiting) effective learning and development processes. For example, learning hours as a metric do not provide information about the distribution or delivery of learning content. Perhaps the crux of his argument rests in his question, “What useful information can actually be gleaned from relying on a benchmark for training hours that fails to account for economies of scale, differences between training requirements across industries, the use of different modalities, and on-the-job learning?”
The answer to that question lies in the purposeful and careful use of this metric in evaluating training and calculating learning ROI. At a minimum, learning hours represent a metric of resource depletion. Assuming training takes place during regular business hours, hours spent in the classroom or self-paced study are equivalent to hours spent away from the job – for each employee hour spent in training, an organization can expect to lose a typical hour of productivity. Thus, learning hours should be considered in the calculation of training costs.
They can also provide a measure of training consumption. Consider a self-paced e-learning course that should take a minimum of 10 hours to complete. If employees spend an average seven hours within the course, there may be cause for concern. Have all employees completed some but not all of the training? Have many employees completed all of the e-learning and others completed part or none of the training? Is it possible that employees are skipping through e-learning modules or sections to find the areas that are most important and relevant to them? Each question implies a different conclusion and follow-up response. In this scenario, learning hours act as a signal that something more may be happening beneath the surface.
Moreover, hours spent by training personnel in support of learning programs can be compared against the hours spent by learners in the classroom as a gauge of relative efficiency. For example, a leadership program may take 100 hours to develop and be delivered to five high potential employees over a six week period for three hours a week. A software training program may also take 100 hours to develop, but be delivered to a group of 500 employees over a three hour period. Is one more efficient than the other? Not necessarily. More information is needed to understand the lost productivity of each employee consuming training, the increase in learned skills of those employees, and the total impact to the business of lost productivity and transferred knowledge and skills. Still, understanding the hours spent in training and on its development and support feeds into the total cost associated with that initiative, which when combined with other critical indicators of training success, enable leaders of the training organization to make relative decisions about the value of their portfolio of offerings.
Bottom line, training hours still offer valuable information about training performance. Should they be used as a stand-alone metric of efficiency or effectiveness? No. But we should not throw the baby out with her bath water. Instead let’s be realistic about what learning hours actually represent; they offer a small piece of the training effectiveness puzzle. When used in conjunction with other contextual and evaluative information, training hours provide insight into the cost and relative efficiency of training programs.
