Cutting Costs For Dummies
Here’s an interesting post on Cutting Costs for Dummies.
My company recently did something similar. They have a program for reimbursing tuition. It’s a great benefit and from my perspective even if the class has nothing to do with the employee’s job, it still works out great for the company. One class is not going to make the employee leave and to take enough classes to get, say, a master’s degree takes forever at one class per semester. You’ve locked the employee in to staying at your company for however many years the degree takes. And they require reimbursement for any courses taken in the 12 months before you quit. So the degree plus another year.
I have a friend who is doing this. She’s in a certificate program, but even then it takes five years (at one course per semester) to get the certificate. She’s in a job that doesn’t pay as well as it could, but doing the work of someone at least one level up. If she wasn’t taking the classes paid for by her employer she’d be long gone and they’d have to spend money to replace her plus getting an additional person one level up to cover the work she’d been doing. So for her company it’s a lot cheaper to send her to class than it is to promote her and pay her what she deserves. They’ve got her locked in for five years (probably four more than she’d have done otherwise), and considering how much time it takes to train a new person, it’s worth it.
So my company has just changed the rules to require that the courses be not just business related, but specifically apply only to the job the employee CURRENTLY has. So someone wanting to take a course that would help them get to the next level in their job is now out of luck. I’m curious how much these courses were really costing the company. One course has to be less expensive than training a new hire plus paying them while they’re useless. Heck, we paid someone in our department to be useless for a year (with no training or mentoring) before firing them. They could have sent her to a couple of courses and made her useful, or fired her in the first month when they discovered how useless she was. Oh well.