Training Hours per Employee

What training hours per employee measures

Training hours per employee (ساعات التدريب للموظف) is an indicator of the average training that one employee received in a stated period. It is calculated by dividing the total training hours in the period by the number of employees. If the total is 300 hours and there are 20 employees, the indicator is 15 hours per employee. It is a figure about quantity, not effect: it shows how much training people received and does not show whether they learned.

A training manager uses it to check whether the budget and the time set aside actually reach employees, and to compare departments and periods. But the figure hides more than it shows when it is examined without checking what went into its numerator and its denominator.

What counts as an hour of training

The numerator is a set of decisions, and each decision changes the figure:

• Formal training or all learning? A course in a classroom or online can be counted. What an employee learns alongside a colleague may be left out because it is not recorded, although job shadowing may teach an employee what a course does not convey. To count it, a recording rule is needed.
• The length of the content or the time actually spent? A learning unit of one hour may be finished by one employee in forty minutes and by another in an hour and a half. The announced length of the programme may be counted, or the time each trainee spent, and the choice is held fixed across all periods.
• A combined programme. It joins two methods, as in blended learning, and the question is whether the classroom hour and the asynchronous hour are counted together with one weight.
• Mandatory and voluntary training. They are counted together or kept apart, because a person who joins what the person chose differs from a person who was placed in what was imposed.

Who is counted as an employee in the denominator

The denominator is a decision as well. Who is counted: everyone on the register on any day of the period, those who were there throughout, or the average over its months? Someone who arrived in the last month did not have the same opportunity. So the denominator is written out plainly. It can be the number of people, or the number of full time equivalents, as defined under full time equivalent (FTE), a unit that converts working hours into a number of full time jobs, so that a person who works half time counts as half a unit.

Example: twenty employees in a year

A hypothetical organisation has 20 employees, of whom 16 work full time and 4 work half time. Five of them received 40 hours of training each, five received 20 hours each, and the other ten received none. The total is (5 × 40) + (5 × 20) = 300 hours. The reading differs with what the total is divided by:

• By the number of people: 300 ÷ 20 = 15 hours.
• By full time equivalents: 16 + (4 × 0.5) = 18, and 300 ÷ 18 = 16.7 hours.
• By those who trained only: 300 ÷ 10 = 30 hours for each trainee.

The decimals are rounded to one place. Each of these readings is correct and answers a question: the first concerns the whole organisation, the second the effort expended, and the third those whom the training reached. Any one of these figures, quoted without naming its denominator, cannot be checked by anyone.

What the average of training hours hides

In the same example half the employees, 10 of 20, received not one hour, and yet the average is 15 hours. The average suggests training spread over everyone. In fact half of them had no training, and the other half trained at an average of 30 hours each. The median, which is the value in the middle when employees are ranked by their hours, is 10 hours, because the tenth and eleventh employees have values of 0 and 20, which average 10. So two figures should accompany the average: the share who received no training at all, which is 10 ÷ 20 × 100 = 50%, and the distribution of hours across groups.

This changes the decision. Someone who sees 15 hours per employee may think the effort is enough. Someone who sees that half the employees have no training asks who they are, which of their roles are affected, and whether they are the people whose training was the more necessary. An organisation may be spending a lot on a few people, which can be a deliberate distribution in a programme to develop a particular group, but it is decided and not discovered by chance.

The period over which training hours are counted

The hours can be counted for a year, but even the year allows two choices: the calendar year, or twelve rolling months updated each month. The first is easier for reports, and the second is steadier against the seasonality of training. The choice is held fixed, as the definition of the hour is.

The effect of the period shows in the denominator when headcount changes within it. If the organisation began the year with 20 employees and ended it with 24, the average number is (20 + 24) ÷ 2 = 22, and the hours per employee are 300 ÷ 22 = 13.6, not 15. Using the average number of employees brings the picture closer, but it does not replace a breakdown of who joined in the last month and had no chance to attend.

Distribution of training hours between groups

The average is split by group because the overall average erases the differences between groups. In the same organisation, four supervisors received 40, 40, 20 and 0 hours, which is 100 hours, and sixteen other employees received 200 hours, of whom three had 40 hours, four had 20 and nine had no training. The total is 100 + 200 = 300 hours as before, and the reading becomes:

• Supervisors: 100 ÷ 4 = 25 hours, and the share of them who did not train is 1 ÷ 4 × 100 = 25%.
• The remaining employees: 200 ÷ 16 = 12.5 hours, and the share of them who did not train is 9 ÷ 16 × 100 = 56.3%.

On average the supervisors received twice what the others received, and nine of the ten people who received no training belong to the second group. This is a picture that cannot be seen from the figure for the whole organisation. Nothing in it says the distribution is wrong, since the organisation may have decided to begin with the supervisors. But whether it was a decision becomes clear only when the distribution is seen.

The hours can also be estimated by the working days they take. The total of 300 hours equals 300 ÷ 8 = 37.5 working days, at an assumed working day of 8 hours. This is an approximate calculation, because some training takes place outside working hours, but it is a reminder that training hours taken during working time are time away from work, so the question is what was given up in exchange.

Why the indicator invites inflation

When the figure becomes a target its nature changes. If every manager is asked to bring the team to 40 hours a year, the easiest course is to fill the hours with whatever can be finished quickly: an online unit left open, or a general lecture with no link to the role. The figure rises and the gaps stay as they were. The remedy is for the organisation not to stop at hours, but to link them to a question: in which gap were these hours spent? That is the question that training needs analysis puts before the programme.

Inflation also appears in “attendance” hours, in which an employee is counted as trained because the employee logged in, even if busy with work. The actual hour is measured by what is completed and not by what is registered, and where that is hard, by a test given after the programme.

How training hours per employee is examined alongside other training indicators

Hours are a basic measure in training, because they measure what was spent. What comes after them are other questions, and different frameworks deal with them:

• Was the training necessary? Training needs analysis answers this: it identifies the gap between the performance required and the current performance before a budget is spent on a course. Fifty hours on a subject with no gap is worse than ten on a real gap.
• Did it help? The Kirkpatrick model measures this at four levels, beginning with participants’ satisfaction and ending with a work result that can be measured.
• Was it met by a benefit that exceeds its cost? Training ROI calculates this, and it is a figure built on earlier decisions, not measured directly.

To judge the success of training by hours alone is to infer from what was spent to what was achieved.

How training hours per employee is used in practice

The figure is collected from a stated source. A direct source is a learning management system, because it records who completed the training and when, and what does not pass through it needs a manual record kept under a rule. The figure is split by role, department and length of service, which shows where training gathers and where it is lacking.

The new employee is separated out, because the new employee’s induction adds hours in the first months. Employee onboarding fills the first months with successive programmes, and its hours may be counted with training, so the average rises in an organisation that hires heavily. This links to what time to productivity measures, the period between starting work and reaching the performance expected of the role.

How many hours of training per employee are enough?

In the sources we reviewed, we found no reference that sets an annual number of hours as sufficient in every organisation. What is sufficient is settled by the role and by what changes in it, by the employee’s experience, and by what the measured gap shows, so each group has a number suited to it. If the figures of two organisations are set side by side, the first thing to examine is how each defines the hour and the denominator, since two figures alike in form may measure different things. The sound comparison is within the same organisation: this year’s average against last year’s by the same definition, one group against another group.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.