There are several situations in which your new employees could require training. For example, after a month of them being on the job, your company might implement a training/ development program meant to provide the employees with certain skill sets and knowledge that would make their job easier and increase their performance.
Moreover, your company can start the training program as soon as a set of new employees are hired – again, in order to ensure increased performance and the fact that they will be well prepared when starting their job.
However, you can’t spend too much time with training your employees, as training comes with its own costs as well – for example, the costs for equipment and materials, for outside lecturers and trainers, and for the salaries that you are going to pay your employees while they are being trained.
Therefore, the Percentage of Employees Trained metric gives you information about the number of employees that have been successfully trained, as well as the time required for the training to be complete.
Training Program Variations
As you probably already know, depending on the information the employees were able to learn in the given period for the training, the company will have to decide whether to get them in their office, working, or extend the training period.
This is where the aforementioned metric comes in handy. Naturally, a higher percentage of employees trained is sought after as the costs decrease and productivity is increased. Therefore, this metric is used by companies to determine how quickly new hires are being onboarded.
However, if the training program is not efficient or fast enough, then the company will have to extend its period – as mentioned before, this adds costs to and takes away productivity from a company.
Calculating the Percentage of Employees Trained
When calculating the percentage of employees trained, you just have to divide the number of employees that have completed their training sessions by the total number of employees that are currently in training and then multiply the result with 100.
For example, let’s say that you have 5 different departments that currently have 100 employees in training. Each department will have different sessions of training, according to their responsibilities – let’s assume that each department consists of 20 employees.
As soon as one department finishes its training program, 20 employees will start working on their jobs – meaning that 20% of your employees in the 5 departments have been trained.
The Bottom Line
A higher percentage of employees trained means that they can start working sooner and contribute to the company’s productivity/ efficiency.
That’s why the teams responsible of the training programs must make sure that the equipment/ materials and lecturers/ trainers used in these training sessions can teach the employees the things they have to know in a relatively short period of time.
Naturally, there must be a balance between the time required to complete a training program and the information/ skills the employees have to gain – a rushed program might lead to employees that get confused when it comes to responsibilities and certain working processes.