I was making a presentation to the HR team of an organisation on their employee survey results. The data seemed to point that Training was one of the key action items for this company. The data was saying that training programs were not adding value to employees, not contributing to real skill-building. When I shared with the team how large the gaps were on Training as compared to benchmarks, the response was “That cannot be true! On an average, an employee goes for X days of training per year.” X days of training! Does it matter?

My simple question is “What is HR’s role here? Are we supposed to be running a training shop? Are we supposed to measure success by counting the number of man-days of training? Or are we supposed to contribute to building organisational and individual capabilities.” Traditional metrics have no place in the organizations of today and top executives express their disdain for them (quietly or loudly).

If HR has to contribute to the growth of the organization, it needs to ask itself and the business what capabilities are critical to compete and build an organization for tomorrow. And then, design & deliver programs which build those critical capabilities. Metrics have to be around how many capability gaps we are closing, rather than how busy the training shops are. Training hours are not the perfect proxy for building capability.

Are you simply running a shop? Or are you helping your company build differentiated capabilities?