I’d like to think so, but my HR doesn’t ha!
I do believe that towards the higher band of professional roles we have the luxury to consider the employee-employer contract on win-win terms, that doesn’t translate when you’re dealing with jobs at the line level. This is potentially because of the value of talent being perceived differently. The only solution to line employees being protected short of benevolent management would be regulation or unions.
Oxymoron in most of my experience ;).
Sharpe
1598
In the big picture, I think that rather than a simple “is this OK or not” approach to the employee training issue, there are two real world considerations. One, is the valuation of the training reasonable? In some cases, there are comparable training courses that you can price-compare to. Also, as long as the cost is clear up front and the employees are free to choose to agree or not, that gives more latitude as to what is considered a reasonable valuation - the employees are basically pricing it by choosing to agree to the terms or not. That then ties in with issue 2, which is the length of time of the commitment to “work off” the training cost. I have a very skeptical view of burdens on labor, considering them fraught with exploitation (with exceptions for highly skilled employees, management employees, highly educated employees, etc.) And I guess that brings up a third issue: pretty much all of my views on labor/employment relation are relative to wages, education level, level of responsibility and so on. I generally feel management can have MUCH more freedom to impose conditions and costs on high wage/high education/high responsibility employees and MUCH less freedom to impose those things on lower wage/lower education/lower responsibility employees.
In the specific case of the pet groomers, I wonder what the wages in the industry generally are? If it’s in that $15/hour range (which is minimum wage in CA) then I feel the groomers should be protected more, but if the earnings range is higher, then I can see allow more room for the company to charge for training. However, in either case, I view the two year commitment as almost certainly too long. I feel like anything over a year is very onerous and has to be justified by very substantial considerations. I don’t have any hard data on this timing issue but my years of experience in workers’ comp and labor law make me feel that job commitments over a year are just fundamentally different than than less than one year.
Lastly, this charge MUST be pro-rated, at least in the case of termination for cause. B/C otherwise the employer is provided a whip-hand and I oppose that quite strongly. (And by “whip-hand” I’m talking about circumstances where an employee has excess power over the employees like not just taking away a job but imposing a large additional cost, revoking immigration status, that sort of thing. The data on that sort of situation is crystal clear: power corrupts and excess power in the hands of employers leads to corrupt abuse of that power in many ways. And I say this as someone who has represented employers for more than 25 years.)
If you can’t stop your employees leaving, you have bigger problems than having paid for their training. The way I see it, if the training is necessary or frankly even useful for the job, the employer should be providing it (or hiring already trained employees if it’s not company specific). If you want to offer training in ancillary skills/qualifications, sure charge for it.
Yeah; tuition reimbursement is a perk. It’s generally viewed as part of the compensation package used to draw in higher-quality (and underpaid, like all students) employees. What PetSmart is doing seems to be something else, altogether.
I agree, and I would add that there’s also an intrinsic value assigned to how replaceable those employees are within the existing availability of talent. I imagine that corporations would be more inclined towards indenturing their skilled or professional class of workers if they were easily replaced.
Oh, I would say that people leave for all kinds of reasons (new job is 10 minutes closer, they want to work in a bigger company with more vertical opportunies, they can get an immediate uplift on their salary), not always because they are treated badly (though that happens). Most of us are also conscious that managers are often constrained by how much budget we get from the organisation for increments (and even rarer, organisational opportunities for promotions). To that end, I’m genuinely happy when employees find a better place. But is it me, or are millenials and younger having shorter periods of employment in the same companies as a general rule?
Yes. Across the board the average tenure at a job is 3-5 years or less from what I’ve read, though if someone has better data by all means share it. This has been true more or less though for a while. Even when I graduated college in 1982 the era of putting in your two or three decades at one place and retiring with a gold watch was coming to an abrupt end. Unless you went to work for the government, or a family business, late boomers like me found ourselves in a much more fluid job world than we had anticipated.
My students graduating college today fully expect to make a lot of lateral moves as well as (they hope) some upward moves during the course of their working lives. Nearly no one expects, or even wants to, work for twenty years for one employer or in one place. This may change when or if they have families, of course, but fresh out of school they seem attuned to being mobile.
Sure. I had four people leave in less than a year largely because of budget reasons (and have also had someone transfer internally out of my team because it was the only way they would get a meaningful promotion). I’m just saying that if companies need trained employees, they should pay for them.
Yes, I definitely saw this becoming a thing in the late 90s and on.
Just stopped to think about my own tenure in different companies.
3 years 1st company
6 years 2nd
2 years 3rd
5 years 4th
4 years 5th
9 years 6th
The first two moves were basically lateral moves to get to companies with more future / opportunity. I would have stayed with the 2nd if they’d given me the time of day, but they clearly weren’t going to. 3rd company got sold out from under me. After that it was all big jumps.
I can’t speak to how things were in the past, but it’s the only way to keep up with the market in most places these days. My company was offering a ~50% increase off my current salary for an external hire in a similar role, but could only find 3% for raises this year to existing employees. Needless to say I’m looking. The loss of vacation time will hurt, but I can’t pay for things with time off.
Sharpe
1606
One think I’m wondering about. I’ve definitely heard that raises within companies are not keeping up with the kind of salary increases that can be had by switching companies, but I’m wondering about the practice of going to the current employer and asking them to match an offer. I have a vague sense that that used to be pretty standard practice, unless the employee was actively looking to get the heck out of Dodge for non-salary reasons. It sounds anecdotally that nowadays, once folks have secured a better offer, they are out of there. Do companies try to keep folks by matching offers? Are employees interested in that? I guess this is kind of two different questions: what is the market situation, and what is going on in peoples’ heads?
This sort of attitude seemed commonplace to me. Every company I ever worked for would pay more for new people than they would for existing incumbents in the same roles. It’s insane.
I think companies may try, but these are basically broken relationships at this point. Once an employee goes as far as finding a better job somewhere else, and discovers how much they are worth to another employer, whatever trust existed in the current company is gone. Similarly, once the company has to respond to what seems to them like blackmail, they always resent it. I’ve seen people be paid to stay, and it never lasts.
Sharpe
1608
See this is different than I recall “how business was done” when I was starting out in the 90s. Maybe law is a different business model but the idea of matching offers was definitely still a thing back then. Even nowadays, I get the sense that’s still a thing in law jobs. But it doesn’t seem to be in other industries, at least now (not sure if it ever was.)
Sharpe
1609
One more thing on this: if failing to keep up with the market can break relationships with employees, why are companies doing it? That doesn’t seem like efficient market behavior, assuming the company will then have to fill the position at market rates, right?
Are we looking at yet another way in which our deregulated, wealth-concentrated economy is not in fact a beautifully magic market economy as dreamed by Milton Friedman et. al.?
(Side note here I tend to view all the “simple market” explanations of the economy as failing to engage with the realities of human psychology and the need for vastly more complex models. This may be an example of that.)
With maybe one or two exceptions, every big-step raise I ever got came from someone to whom I was basically a complete stranger, whereas the people who knew me well all expressed shock and dismay that I was leaving to take that offer. Big Corporations are generally not ready or disposed to manage extraordinary comp decisions for internal staff; only for new hires. Of course this is different for people at the very top. Once you reach the right level, the corporation is organized to keep shoveling extraordinary rewards to you.
The simple answer is that the corporation doesn’t care. You’re a replaceable cog in a machine to them. They don’t think about you beyond that. They don’t expect you to disappear, but if you do disappear, they can find another just like you. It might cost them a bit more, but all the money they save on you and the rest of the cogs over the years makes up for it, at least in their calculus.
I’m not talking about your boss, here. Your boss may care a lot about you, but your boss can’t change the rules for you or for anybody else. And the rules reflect the values of the corporation , not your boss.
Sharpe
1611
The issue I’m seeing is that based on lateral moves for more money as described here, that doesn’t seem to be true. If the market at another company is higher than what you are making at your company, that means the company will have to pay that market to replace you. I mean if the market is higher is than the wage they are offering, in the long run there’s no denying the market.
But then we get into both systemic stuff within each company and psychological stuff within each employee/new opportunity.
But if this “the only way to make more money is to move laterally” is true, that to me screams that the companies are not actually behaving in a market efficient way. Which in turn means that the myth of the magical efficiency of our corporate overlords is vastly oversold.
I think the point is that they assume turnover will remain fairly low, so it’s cheaper for them to replace 5-10% of people at market rate each year than it is to keep 100% of the workforce at market rates.
Yes, exactly. Paying everyone the fair market rate is far more costly than just paying market rates for the positions that turn over.
Sharpe
1614
This may be true but that also indicates the market is not actually setting the price of labor, across the board, in an efficient way. That implies there is a “stickiness” to having a job which causes labor to be underpriced, which is consistent with the “economic psychology” theories about the stickiness of certain things.
Sharpe
1615
Also given that the rate of cycling jobs appears to have increased, what has changed from prior decades?
