The annual training disclosure asks five questions. None of them is difficult on its own. What makes December hard is that the answers live in different places: attendance in one system, invoices in finance, external workshops in a manager’s calendar, and the categorisation nowhere at all until someone invents it.
Taken one at a time, here is where each figure comes from and what makes it go wrong.
Number of trainees
A count of people, not of enrolments — someone who completed four courses is one trainee. That distinction is the single most common error, and it inflates the figure in a way that is obvious to anyone reading it against your headcount.
The count also spans categories beyond employees: co-op trainees, graduates, and jobseekers who received training. If you run a co-op or graduate programme, those people belong in the number, and they are usually tracked outside whatever system holds employee training.
Average training hours per worker
This is the figure that cannot be reconstructed. An average per worker requires knowing hours per person, which means the record has to have captured duration against attendance as it happened. A total number of training hours divided by headcount is a different statistic, and it will not match anything you can defend.
For training delivered outside the platform, capture the duration at the point of assignment rather than at the point of completion. A workshop assigned as "attend the session" gives you attendance; assigned as "attend the six-hour session" gives you the figure.
Total cost
Straightforward in finance and hard to attribute. The total spend is easy to pull; splitting it into what was training activity and what was something else usually requires a decision about how to treat facilitator time, travel, and platform subscriptions.
Make that decision once, write it down, and apply it the same way next year. The figure matters less than its consistency — a number that moves 40% because the accounting treatment changed is the kind of thing that attracts a question.
Types and activities, by category
The one that becomes a project. Categorising a year of training in December means reading back through it and making judgement calls, at which point two people will categorise the same workshop differently.
Decide the categories at the start of the year and attach one to each activity when it is created. It takes seconds per activity and turns the fifth answer into a grouped count.
Setting it up so December is a query
Everything above reduces to one principle: the disclosure is a reporting problem, and reporting problems are solved at capture time, not at reporting time.
In practice that means one record covering internal and external training alike, duration and category attached to each activity when it is scheduled, and attendance recorded per person. Salalem is built that way, and can export the disclosure figures directly — but the principle holds whatever you run it on, and a well-kept spreadsheet beats a platform that only sees half the training.