We currently only measure our trainer productivity by hours in the classroom and I am seeking an industry standard to benchmark against. We are seeking ways of better measuring the "other stuff" (e.g. analysis, evaluation etc). How many days would you expect trainers to be in the classroom per year? Thanks.
4 Responses
Starter for 10
Fiona,
Not sure of any hard and fast and rules on this one. In my experience, most freelance trainers like to do about 3 days delivery a week. This gives them 2 days for preparation, materials development, admin, building client relationships and completing any follow-up work. You can do 4 or even 5 days a week from time to time, but I don’t believe it is sustainable in the long term.
When I was an employed consultant, we were expected to be 70% utilised on client work i.e. work that was paid for and directly adding value. This gave up 30% of time to support buisness develpment, work on internal matters and of course, personal development.
I’d be interested to know what others think.
Sheridan Webb
http://www.keystonedevelopment.co.uk
Time training
Hi Fiona, we used to use 3.5 days per week, this was a company standard at Norwich Union.
Cheers.
Trainer days benchmark
Fiona
This is a question that comes up from time to time. There is no meaningful benchmark because there are so many variables. A typical mean average might be around 60% of the time on delivery or 120 days a year. However, if you have experienced trainers who only do delivery (no client liaison, no needs analysis, no design, no evaluation, little travel, etc) on a small batch of fairly stable programmes (few technical updates, context rarely changes, the design – activities and content – are well proven, little person prep), then maybe you can expect more. These days many trainers have a broader role and course delivery days is not a good measure of activity much less performance.
Graham
‘Guesstimates’
Hi all,
Thanks for your responses. This confirms some of the other ‘guesstimates’ we have been working towards. It’s very difficult to be precise because we have to consider so many variations, but at least we need a figure to aim towards and review our success against. Obviously this isn’t the only thing for us to consider and it isn’t an exact science.
Graham- I totally agree: Standard does not equal Quality!
Does anyone use a time recording system (excel sheets/software etc) to help them better measure/track trainer utilisation?
Thanks all.
F.