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.

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