Following on from last week, I said I’d look at training as the second area of investment in Human Capital. A couple of years ago, I was recruiting a General Manager in an IT business in Sydney. Ths company wrote software for the kind of commercial booths that now issue your photos, print your boarding passes and so on. While discussing the role, the CEO said, “You know, we have all sorts of problems keeping our developers. It seems we train them to go and work at other software companies, and we pay reasonably well, why is that?”
Don't Set Up Your Core Workforce for their dream job if it's elsewhere
I asked him what they were trained in, he said “Oh, we know we have to keep them interested, so we do MS certification, maybe some Citrix courses, we make sure they are across all the Cisco stuff and then we help them learn new languages too”. Then I said to him, “But you said your software is unique right, it’s all your own code?” He said that was correct.
I then pointed out that he was setting them up to leave. These people were receiving training investment that their jobs didn’t require. He was wasting his money, making them more marketable and then watching them become frustrated that they could not use their new skills – then they left and he had to skill up new developers in his own software, compounding the problem.
So, spend your training money wisely. Your value creating jobs should be invested in, they will produce a return, or you will change the people. The people in value protecting jobs can be developed towards the value creating jobs that exist in the business. Suppport people just need essential skills and process training. Of course you might find hidden talent you want to develop – but make sure you have, or can create, a role for them. If you don’t, they will take the return on your investment to a new employer.
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