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If an employee leaves soon after training, can I require cost repayment?
Our new employee training process is quite costly and we have had a few employees leave 2-3 months after completing it. Can I require that an employee repay us for training costs if they leave shortly after we take them on?
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4 Answers
Ouch! Prevention is better than cure.
It's important to analyse your companies training culture and the whole process of who goes to what training. If the training is expensive and the employee leaves soon after, I'd suggest that the employee may not have been the right person to go in the first place. A well structured high potential employee program helps to identify employees who are engaged in their jobs and the company. Engaged employees are not as likely to leave their jobs in the short term.
Don't penalise employees, teach managers how to manage employees to be more engaged and select engaged employees to go to expensive training.
Does your employee training lead to a qualification? It might be the case that your organisation has become known for providing such training so that people join you solely to obtain that qualification. Unlikely but just about possible I suppose.
If the training is really so valuable I suppose you could come up with some sort of training cost replacement contract to recoup the costs if they leave within, say, the first year of employment but I tend to go along with Nadine that this sort of turnover could be a pointer to the selection process.
There is a third, but for you less palatable, possibility. Perhaps the training is perceived to be poor or ineffective or overly demanding and folks are just voting with their feet.
A bit of "disinterested" analysis might help you to figure out the causes and of course exit interviews or post departure follow up questionnaires might help to get to the bottom of things. Good luck - it's a tricky problem.
Employees who leave soon after they complete training are telling us something. We need to ask...
1. Are they underpaid?
2. Are they mismanaged?
3. Are they in the wrong job?
Reason 3 is the easiest to correct.
Reason 1 may be the costliest to correct.
Reason 2 may be the hardest to correct.
Hi Julie,
You ask: Can I require that an employee repay us for training costs if they leave shortly after we take them on? I concur with the general theme of previous answers which is no. I'm going to hypothesize that the vast majority of individuals who quite after a few months probably do so with great stress. By this I mean that they went into the new job with much positive intent and over the course of the following months discovered (for whatever reason) that this was not the place for them. If there's no fit, then both the individual and company are better off apart. The cost, I'm afraid, is part of doing business.
The "for whatever reason" must, however, be identified as possible. Richard suggests an exit interview and I agree. In fact, you may be able to leverage the training investment as a way to extract good feedback on what went wrong.
Geoff Vincent
CEO
http://www.bizcompare.com
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