One common concern is what if we invest in employee training and they leave? But what if we don’t invest and they stay? Instead, why not create a training contract that benefits everyone involved?
It’s time to shift our perspective on training from being an expense to being a tool for cross-skilling and upskilling our workforce. By promoting continuous learning and development, we can help our employees improve and grow. In fact, studies show that 68% of workers consider training and development opportunities to be the most important policy of an organisation. Additionally, 86% of millennials say they would have stayed at their job if they were offered training. Imagine how much we could reduce staff turnover by simply investing in training.
To illustrate, let’s say you have an employee who makes £30,000 per year and wants to study for the CIPD L5 qualification for £2,750. This investment of £2,750 will take the employee 12 months to complete. By providing this training opportunity, you can retain valuable employees and promote their professional growth, ultimately benefiting your organisation as a whole. Putting that employee within a training contract can also increase your retention period by another 12 months.
Let’s consider another scenario where an employee requests additional training, but the organisation denies their request. As a result, the employee becomes disengaged and disconnected from their work, searching for a new job for three months until they eventually leave. During this time, their performance drops to 70%, resulting in a loss of £1750 in optimal staff performance.
To replace them, you must advertise and pay a recruitment fee of 20% of the new employee’s annual salary, which is £6,000. This process involves interviewing ten candidates and conducting a three-second interview with three senior people for a total of 39 hours at a rate of £45 per hour (£1755). Even after finding the perfect candidate, their performance may only be at 70% as they learn how the company operates, resulting in a further loss of £1750.
The total investment over one year in this scenario is £11,255, with an 86% chance that the new hire will leave due to a lack of training and investment in their development.
So maybe when you need to think about how investing in training will not only keep motivation and performance high but also save the organisation time and money, which is really important as something as simple as agreeing to fund training and putting a training contract together can save you more than 4 times the amount it would have cost to replace a disengaged employee which is why it’s important to train to retain.
