I work in a voluntary sector organisation with just over 130 staff. I'm trying to find out what is the average number of internal training days planned per year, for an organisation this size, and how many training days should be allocated for each employee?
Your help is welcomed.
Natasha Wallace
natasha wallace
5 Responses
CIPD report
Natasha
Accoriding to the CIPDs own report in to Training and Development (downloadable from their site), the figures are:
less than 3 days = 18%
between 3 – 5 days = 32%
more than 5 days = 50%
In the public sector average number of days = 5.5 and in the private sector = 6 days.
I would recomend you download and read this document it is very useful.
Peter
Pick A Number…?!
I’m not sure I can add to Peter’s response about average training days for an organisation of your size.
As far as number of training days that should be allocated, the very simple answer is
“as many as are needed!”
Not helpful I’m sure when you are thinking about budgets and how much time and money to ask for etc. I understand this – several years agon I was a training manager faced with these questions too!
My point is that if limited resources are going to be used for training, it had better be for a darned (!?) good reason, like improving performance of a key indicator (and that CAN include employee satisfaction/morale if decided as a strategic goal for the year). Also, different training methods exist, and with eLearning, accelerated learning and several other methods, what required a day or 2 of disruption in the past might now be done with perhaps 1/2 day of disruption (and some of the employee’s own time?).
I appreciate you need some hard numbers, so could I suggest that in working on some hard numbers you consider the following:
1 – Ask line managers/supervisors what development needs they and their team have that are important enough suffer at least some disruption to their operations.
2 – Ask them to indicate how much time, and in what intensity (e.g. 3 days over the year, in 2 hr chunks, and 1 session of 1/2 day) and to which training needs for each individual – i.e. ask them to help you come up with a training plan for THEIR team!
3 – Failing the above, try Martin’s Rule of 3: Three days of training over the year, in 1/2 day chunks, to cover the top 3 development needs – it’s totally arbitrary but sounds almost reasonable! (I learnt many years ago, having spent 8 busy weeks on the budge, that it was looked at with the same rigour and caused me the same amount of grief when I did the budget in about 1hr!!)
Good luck!
Martin Schmalenbach
Director
Potential Energy Ltd
http://www.p-nrg.com
Government Figures
If you interrogate this web site you will be able to get the current government figures on this issue:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/
Think about entitlement
When I was producing the ILM video on leadership and change (A vision for change) I visited a successful manufacturing company that had given all employees an absolute entitlement to 1 hour’s training per week. This would amount to around seven days per year, I suspect. It was possible to negotiate for more, but the entitlement was matched by a clearly thought out strategy for encouraging all employees to achieve certain learning outcomes in line with the company’s strategic development priorities.
Consequently, I would suggest that you ask a different set of questions – what do we want the development of our people to achieve, how best can we achieve those goals, and what does that imply in budgetary terms? The number of days’ training is a by-product of this, not an input to the decision-making process.
Training Allocation
Research with leading organisations concludes that they allocate around 3% of payroll for training and development.