Can someone help me here? I've got all kinds of ratios and I don't even know for sure what this ratio tells me! I need show the number of hours of training offered per employee this year. Does this mean the number of hours of training that each employee could have attend if he or she chose?

My calculation says to take (Total Training Hours/Total Headcount FTE)*100. I did this, only I used all employees for my figure. I came up with a pretty decent number. But, what does it tell me, how do I explain it, and why do I multiply it times 100?

In my example, we offered a total of 305 hours of training in 2008. We have ~450 total employees, ~350 FTE. Employees attended training more than once so it shows there are 877 employees who have attended training in 2008.

I'm scratching my head, any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

There are two numbers: total available hours of training "available" and training hours per employee.

The per employee number is really interesting. If you have 100 employees and they combined took 1440 hours, then the average is 14.4 hours per employee. But I got this number assuming 60 of the employees took a four day (24 contact hour) class and the others took nothing. So it is interesting to look at how many took how much. This might take the form of a bar graph with bars for over 60 hours, 50-60 and so on, or whatever your numbers look like.

The FTE and *100 are to account for non 1.0FTE employees. I'd keep it simple unless you have a lot of those. If you do, then you might want to normalize the data somehow. That is, if a .5FTE employee took 10 hours, then you would normalize that to 20 hours for the 1.0 FTE. This can get tricky, especially if you have classes everyone has to take.

The available hours of training is a totally different animal. If you have 30 events of 10 hours each and 20 seats available per event, you have 6000 hours available. But, nobody can take just 2 hours. Maybe a better number is how many unfilled seats you have. It kind of depends on what you want to show. I have seen companies show average enrollment per event, but that does not reflect the optimal or maximum class size information.

Mostly, these are just numbers

Thanks - I can't say I'm in any better shape after your post. But, I do think I understand a little better. Thanks for your response.

Chase-

I have typically looked at the number of available training hours/FTE.
6 hour course with 12 seats = 72 available hours.

I am not sure what the value of the number is though? All the number tells you is how many training hours could have been completed this past year. The typical number most companies want to see is actual hours per employee. Number of hours of training completed/FTE.

I guess the number would be valuable if your looking for missed opportunities. Actual available hours v. Actual hours completed.

Thanks D, so if I look at my numbers I show that we have completed a total of 305 hours of training this year. We have 400 employees. I would do the following: 305/400 = .76. So is this telling me that we completed 3/4's of hour of training per FTE this year?

Seems like I need to work on that number if it's correct from my calculation.

Thanks.