Measuring learning costs is getting increasing attention, especially since
more and more companies are increasing their learning efforts.
Generally, anything readily identifyable can be included in learning
costs. These generally fall into a few distinct categories:
External expenses -- consultants, facilitators, material purchases or
licenses, travel for consultants, program fees.
Hard internal expenses -- copying costs, refreshments, wages for employee
fill-ins, some administrative
Soft internal expenses -- wages for non-replaced employees, cost of
facilities, some administrative
If an expense is easy to measure and is useful to you then its probably
appropriate. If not, I wouldn't include it. If you are thinking about
getting government funding, it's best to identify as much cost information as
possible. That way you can ask for funding for the some of the out of pocket
expenses and demonstrate significant "corporate matching." The government
agencies like to see that the company is paying too.
Many companies are falling into the trap of taking the training "pill" by
allocating x% of sales, or xx hours/employee/year to training. This CAN
work, but can really backfire. It's a system in which what you REALLY want
may not necessarily align with the system incentives. When that happens it
requires more "management effort" to steer the system.
You might want to consider tracking results. Since (I think) you are looking
at internal training, it may be feasible. I've had pretty good success
getting support for learning when work results were achieved. Cost is less
of an issue if the "leap of faith" between spending the time & money and
getting the results is narrowed.
You might also want to look at how your training supports the business
capability gaps. Many time old training organizations are keepers of
corporate curricula which has lot's of "good stuff" but really does not serve
the needs of the business. As you start to identify learning needs that
address business gaps, you just might find a lot of them that are NOT best
addressed by training. I'm finding that a very large amount of the learning
in my organization (maybe 80%) needs to be non-classroom learning.
I hope you'll find something useful in this lengthy response.
Bill Eureka (Bernou11i@aol.com)