TRAINING: Investment or gamble? Available to Purchase

In the December issue of this journal I suggested that: • the financial evaluation of training costs is extremely difficult in the present state of our knowledge • the present system of grant aid is inherently inefficient and training is a special case because trained people, unlike other investments can leave the firm once they are trained, thus representing a dead loss in training costs. To meet this I suggested: • training costs should be amortised over a given period • if a trainee leaves, his outstanding costs should become a charge on the new employer and a credit to the employer who carried out the training (thus shifting the cost of training from producer to consumer) • Government support would be necessary for such a scheme in the way of collecting and distributing these payments via PAYE or National Health Insurance contributions. In this article I want to consider how such a scheme would work in practice and to discuss some points which have arisen from the earlier article.