Hello there,
Our COO has asked that we turn in monthly metrics. I am the a one woman show at this point - we are in search of a replacement retail trainer - other than giving him the old butts in seats numbers and amount of classes trained in a month - there just doesn't seem time to do the back end work to get the meaningful numbers - even if I knew what those were - any ideas, thoughts on other meaningful training metrics I could put together on a monthly basis? Thanks in advance for your input. jbaldwin@cffc.com

What metrics would be meaningful to your business (and thus to your COO)? That will give you the ultimate answer to your question.

For an outsider, that question is almost impossible to answer without knowing more details. What does your company do? How does it measure success? What are you training on? Are these new hires or existing employees? Etc. Etc. Etc.

I am the training manager for a community bank. Most of the retail training is for new employees - teller training, customer service representative training, head teller training. We also have sessions on customer service, product knowledge, lending,referrals leadership development ....

It's tough being a small department. Here are my thoughts. Does the COO have an idea of what measurements they are looking for? i.e. what would a good number look like and what would a bad number look like?

Is the COO under pressure from their boss to produce these numbers without clear definition as to what they would be? Does the company have communicated and accepted business goals that the training you are providing may link naturally into?

In many companies, well designed and attended, training that is aligned with overall corporate goals is considered cost justified and bringing value to the company. I wrote an article coming out in the June issue of CLO Magazine that addresses new ways to place a value on training that are more appropriate for the timeframes and resources available in today's business environment for developing quantitative evaluation measurements.

Mark Bower

Gotcha. Does your bank have software that tracks teller errors, referrals, and things like that? If so, those are readily obtainable metrics that you can use to track teller performance. If not, I guarantee your COO has some idea of where you stand on key metrics like that. Whatever those metrics are, use them to drive your new hire training metrics. For example, on average how long does it take a new teller to get down to the baseline error rate of an experienced teller?