Flexibility, turnover and training Available to Purchase

Addresses the question of whether a high turnover of staff is accompanied by lower investment in company‐training. By means of a written questionnaire, data were collected from 223 companies in four different sectors: the food sector, the wholesale trade, the printing industry and the software sector. Besides the turnover of staff, introduces the degree of contractual flexibility and the existence of an internal labour market as explanatory variables in the discussion. In contradiction to most labour economic thinking on training, finds a positive relationship between fluctuations in the number of employees and the investment in training. The findings indicate that company training is particularly concentrated on inflow and replacement problems. Therefore, concludes that financial support measures of governments might benefit more the recruitment policy of companies instead of the high ideal of “lifelong learning”.