Re: Consulting companies are not recruiting companies

[Daniele Muscetta <daniele () muscetta com>]

ken_i_m () fatair net wrote:

> Many employers have learned the bitter lesson that training is expensive. 
>
> After getting training the employees usually want a raise.  Then when the 
> employer delays giving that raise in order to recoup some of those 
> training expenses the employee quits to take a higher paying job elsewhere.
>
>  

This is indeed a good point.
In some companies, for SOME people, training is just a mean of getting 
higher or getting more money, or they will quit.
In other places (in my ideal world ?), people actually do want training, 
to be able to do their job better and because they just like to learn. 
the training itself gets seen like a raise !
The possibility to learn is - at least to me - much more attractive than 
any raise in money.
In this kind of idilliac and ideal situations where an employee would 
like to work better, to know more (to be able to do its job better -
and also for that warm fuzzy feeling of knowledge for its own sake), the 
employee is usually able to 'do more with less' (the *real* way): to 
hack things together and making them work,
instead of investing huge amoung of money in out of the shelf solutions. 
The issue also was about spending $$$ for expensive software BUT NOT for 
training.
Well, while I see your point that in some situation providing training 
might result in following expenses too (raise of wages, etc),
I also think buying expensive software and having it implemented by 
external people (as most of the times happen) also brings hidden cost 
afterwards:
1) software these days becomes more and more a sort of 
abonment/subscription - so you don't just spend once, but you keep 
spending for it;
2) if you don't have the skills in house, you have to pay again the same 
consultant over and over for ongoing maintenance and to fix things when 
they break;
3) if you did not have the skill in the first place to know enough about 
a certain software/solution, and you relied only on the advice of those 
selling it to you - in some cases
(often, IMHO) you might find afterwards that they sold you a lot of 
marketing, and that the product does not perform as good as expected, or 
does not satisfy you 100%.
So I also consider those hidden costs.
Most likely, tough, I am idealistic in thinking that all the employees 
might be happy with just the training, with learning, with knowing new 
things.....
I can believe that out there many other people reduce it to a mere 
question of money, and they will quit when they don't get a raise. Not 
all people are the same.




> I've been the guy signing the checks and I was idealistic about training 
> employees.  I now work as a consultant and invest in my own training.  :-)
>  

I see. At least you can choose for yourself now :-)


Daniele

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