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New Manual Reporting Cost Calculator estimates expenditures
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How much are you spending on manual data collection and reporting? We continue to be surprised that many learning managers don’t seem to know!  In fact, many don’t even realize the significant amount of time and resources L&D puts into manual learning data collection and custom report writing.  According to a 2007 study of over 300 learning managers, over 50% in organizations with an LMS were using one or more manual workaround methods to create and publish all the reports requested of L&D by their stakeholders.

Out of the box, most LMSes only report activity at the transaction level and don’t roll up the data into meaningful statistics.  They also don’t report or correlate the ever important business impact data.   As a result, L&D finds themselves having to write custom reports that pull together learning and business data from all sources to see how effectively learning is being delivered across the organization.  Rarely can L&D fulfill the requests from learning stakeholders for reports through an existing LMS standard report.

So to help managers see what annualized cost and FTE are being expended in their organization, we’ve created the Manual Reporting Cost Calculator. It requires only a few estimates of time and average hourly wage rates to derive a dollar figure and FTE level for your current manual reporting efforts. Please try it out and let us know what you think! Access the Cost Calculator at http://www.getzeroedin.com/calculator.php

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Great new book on learning measurement
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Industry consultant Josh Bersin has recently released The Training Measurement Book: Best Practices, Proven Methodologies and Practical Approaches. This is a fresh and insightful new work on measurement that we recommend to all our Get Zeroed-In on Learning Measurement readers.

Based on years of research with hundreds of organizations, the book provides an easy-to-follow, business-driven approach to the ever elusive concept of measuring learning impact.  The book provides answers to why and how we should measure learning and describes the pros and cons of using ROI as a measure of impact.

The book examines nine measurement areas that comprise Bersin’s model – The Impact Measurement Framework – and details a seven-step training measurement process, identifying best practices, tips, and techniques that make measuring impact easy.

Appendices offer supplemental material, including: case studies on how Ranstad measures on boarding and how HP developed an integrated measurement approach; research on the state of measurement today; tools you can use today to automate the Impact Measurement Framework; and examples of learning measurement and training analytic system specifications.

If you are new to the learning field, The Training Measurement Book gives you everything you need to start measuring your initiatives. If you are many years into the measurement journey, the book will motivate you to embed measurement as a de facto part of how your training group operates.

Bersin and Associates are conducting a series of webinars that discuss the main findings of the book, with the next one scheduled for early October. For webinar date and times or to register for the next session, browse to http://www.bersin.com/News/Events.aspx.

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Featured Measure: Profitability Per Employee (PPE)
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By Sue Todd, President and CEO, Corporate University Xchange

Introduction: Talent Management and Corporate Learning professionals need new ways to help quantify and track the value of talent and knowledge in terms that are meaningful to business professionals.  Common training metrics – the Kirkpatrick model and Jack Phillips ROI - evaluate the effectiveness of individual programs or events.  HR metrics tend to measure tactical activities related to hiring and retaining employees.  While these measures are important indicators of how Talent, HR, and Learning leaders are running their own functions, they don’t quite get to business value.

Corporate University Xchange (CorpU) developed a Talent Balanced Scorecard that consists of 20 new metrics that align to Talent Management strategies.  It also includes another 20 learning and development diagnostic measures that can help an organization determine if its learning programs are hampering its talent strategy. Profitability per employee is one of these metrics.

What it means:  Profitability per employee is not a complex idea but I first came across it in the book Mobilizing Minds by Lowell L. Bryan and Claudia Joyce, two McKinsey consultants.  Most organizations track sales or revenue per employee as a ratio to understand productivity.  It allows them to compare themselves with peers to see if they are generating more or less revenue with a given number of employees.  When the ratio is moving upwards, they know each person, on average, is becoming more productive.  If the ratio is trending downward, it’s obvious that the company is not operating efficiently, and needs to eliminate jobs and still hit the same targets to be competitive. Start-up companies use the ratio to determine if they are generating enough business to support the staff they’ve hired.

Bryan and Joyce found that companies with higher numbers of thinking-intensive jobs grew profitability per employee at a faster rate than those with a larger volume of labor-intensive work.  They expected to find that companies with 100,000 employees would earn more per employee than those with 200,000 because they’d be easier to manage.  However, they found that some companies – no matter how large and no matter what industry – were generating higher profits per person by maximizing the value created through their thinking-intensive roles. 

Profitability per employee differs from revenue per employee because it eliminates the impact of additional capital investments.  A company can add new stores and increase sales headcount to grow revenue while destroying profitability.  They can’t improve profitability that way.  It reflects people’s knowledge, creativity and innovation – the intangibles that are driving higher value from a fixed set of assets.

How it's measured:  The formula for profitability per employee is a very simple one:  Net Income / Total Number of Employees.

Net income is informally called the bottom line because it is typically found on the last line of a company's income statement.

Net income = Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold – Sales Discounts – Cost of Returned Goods – Expenses – Preferred Stock Dividends

Learn More: Check the CorpU webinar schedule for upcoming web casts on talent and learning metrics and other related topics at http://corpu.com/news/webinars/

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Meet Zeroed-In At upcoming industry events
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2008 Fall CLO Symposium

Network with Zeroed-In president and founder Chris Moore at the CLO Symposium: Measuring Success: Learning’s Positive Impact on Business in late September in beautiful Coronado, CA.  To meet with Chris at the Symposium, email him at cmoore@getzeroedin.com

2008 Chicagoland Learning Leaders Conference

This year's conference theme will be Business Transformation and Multi-Cultural Issues with Globalization and will include a presentation by Accenture on their experiences using Zeroed-In’s CLO Dashboard to increase efficiencies in their learning function.

Elliott Masie’s Learning 2008

Join Elliott Masie, Zeroed-In, and over 1000 of your learning colleagues at Learning 2008.  Learning 2008 is designed by and for learning implementers. Let's embrace the future, while being realistic about the difference between "hype" and effectiveness.

• September 24-26, 2008 – CLO Symposium –- Coronado, CA
• October 26-29, 2008 – Elliott Masie’s Learning 2008 –- Orlando, FL
• November 7, 2008 – Chicagoland Learning Leaders  -- St. Charles, IL

More details about these events at: http://www.getzeroedin.com/events.php