Benchmarking is a practice that enables organizations to create a data-driven foundation for decision-making, provides context around performance to help identify improvements and uncovers new practices for adoption across an enterprise. Organizations often carry out benchmarking by comparing their performance on key measures against external peers and competitors.

However, if you’re not also benchmarking within your own four walls, you may be missing opportunities to find improvements that lead to breakthrough performance for key HR processes.

A good example of a measure that can help drive value for HR and the business through internal benchmarking is the average time it takes to close an identified skill gap through training. After breaking down our data for this measure, we explain how to use it most effectively and what you can do to improve your performance if you find it lagging.

What is this measure, and why does it matter?

This measure tracks the average amount of time—in terms of calendar days—that passes between the time you start to close an identified skill gap through training and when the gap is fully closed. It represents an average of all the skill gaps that organizations have closed through training for a 12-month period.

We find that organizations at the median take 20 days to close a skill gap. Organizations that take the longest (at the 75th percentile) need 36 days or more, while those at the 25th percentile can close a skills gap in an average of 10 days or fewer.

What’s at stake with this measure

The average number of days that it takes to close a skill gap through training is an important effectiveness measure for your learning and development function, especially if L&D is expected to deliver training within a certain timeframe as part of a service level agreement. However, the importance of this measure goes beyond L&D. It also relates to your organization’s ability to adjust as business conditions change, seize new business opportunities as they arise and give your people the skills they need faster than other organizations to achieve competitive advantage.

Of course, speed isn’t everything. Highly technical skills in specialized areas will naturally take longer to impart to employees through training than teaching someone how to prepare a Caesar salad. However, longer cycle times can be a warning sign that there are bottlenecks or inefficiencies putting you at a higher risk for quality errors, inefficient use of L&D resources and even a hit to your operating budget if you need to hire temporary workers to fill gaps while employees are training. As emergent technologies like AI make the need for upskilling and reskilling more urgent, it’s more important than ever for organizations to ensure training is driving the right outcomes within an appropriate timeframe.

How to use this measure for internal benchmarking

Performance on this measure can vary widely based on an organization’s industry, the complexity of the skills or capabilities that employees need to develop, and even how an organization defines and carries out training. For those reasons, it can be more challenging to compare your results in an “apples-to-apples” way against other organizations. To get the full benefit of this measure, it’s best to use it for internal benchmarking between functions, teams or business units instead.

Rather than tracking how long it takes to close any and every skills gap in your organization, you’ll be best served by focusing on skills that are business critical and those you’re working to close in high volumes. If your organization is in the coffee business and has a chain of coffee shops, for example, your training for baristas will obviously be an area of high impact for you. Finding opportunities to improve training for skills that are core to your organization’s work can lead to big wins in terms of cost savings, productivity and employee engagement.

Provide broader context for leaders as you interpret this measure

As you discuss your benchmarking results with leaders, it’s important to provide them with broader context that includes the types of skills gaps you’re working to close, how much money you have to devote to L&D, how much time employees have for training and any other internal factors that could play a role in shaping what this measure looks like.

You’ll also want to track this measure alongside:

• Learning assessments
• Pre- and post-learning surveys
• Manager and employee satisfaction with training and training outcomes
• Cost, especially if an external vendor is involved

These measures not only add important context but also help ensure that you don’t optimize one area (efficiency in training) at the expense of other important priorities like cost or learning outcomes.

Closing skill gaps more efficiently

If training is taking longer than it should for specific skills or capabilities, the strategies below can help boost efficiency:

• Look for best practices across the enterprise. The power of internal benchmarking lies in its ability to surface best practices that can spread across the business. If some functions or business units are closing skill gaps much faster than others, have leaders from those areas share their tips and strategies.
• Look for administrative inefficiencies or other bottlenecks that may be slowing down requests for training, budget approvals or procurement for resources like vendors. Optimize and improve the processes that support training as much as you can.
• Consider whether training is the appropriate method for closing specific skill gaps. In some cases, you may be able to use mentoring or a job rotation more effectively.
• Don’t try to improve all of your training in every area at once. Instead, identify criteria for prioritizing the most important or business-critical areas where you can work to improve training and start there.
• Carry out workforce planning so you know the gaps you need to close and can set up training with enough lead time to work efficiently.
• Standardize training as much as you can. Standardization enables you to train people at higher levels of scale and will always be more efficient than ad hoc or one-off approaches.

Key takeaways

External benchmarking against your peers and competitors is a valuable practice, but you lose half the benefits of benchmarking when you don’t also compare your performance internally. Doing so can help identify effective approaches and practices for training that you can then apply more widely.

If you haven’t done so already, set a baseline for how long it takes to train employees on your most business-critical skills. Then, track your performance over time and work to continuously improve it. The goal is not to train people as fast as possible; it’s to make the best use of your L&D resources by minimizing waste and adopting practices that make training more efficient. The most effective strategies for accomplishing these goals may already be within your own four walls and among your best teams. You just need to surface them through internal measurement and comparison.

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Data in this content was accurate at the time of publication. For the most current data, visit www.apqc.org.

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