Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
chronicle.com
Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
1–10 of 149 posts
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#2The whole for-profit code school thing has been giving me the creeps since I started hearing about it years ago, precisely because it's the potential employees paying for hyper-specific training. I wonder if there would be fewer outcries about a talent shortage if companies were somehow incentivized to hire these more junior people with the explicit goal of training them up to a productive level.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#3The whole for-profit code school thing has been giving me the creeps since I started hearing about it years ago, precisely because it's the potential employees paying for hyper-specific training. I wonder if there would be fewer outcries about a talent shortage if companies were somehow incentivized to hire these more junior people with the explicit goal of training them up to a productive level.
This should be less risky for large corps like MS, IBM etc. I believe this may already be done?
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#4The whole for-profit code school thing has been giving me the creeps since I started hearing about it years ago, precisely because it's the potential employees paying for hyper-specific training. I wonder if there would be fewer outcries about a talent shortage if companies were somehow incentivized to hire these more junior people with the explicit goal of training them up to a productive level.
My opinion is divided about the "pay-to-play" model of workers paying for their own training. On one hand, they assume all the risk and financial hardship of training. On the other hand, compared to other developed economies (British, Australian), they have more opportunities to change careers because the risk of training has already been assumed by the worker. I've found that American hiring is far more flexible than the Commonwealth tradition of jockeying for an apprenticeship. And older workers have far less opportunity for apprenticeships.
It's hard to defend the code schools though. There are a high amount of horror stories we hear about them on HN, from both the students' and hiring managers' perspectives.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#5The Uber robotics talent raid of CMU took piratization to a logical extreme, http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube...
"They took all the guys that were working on vehicle autonomy — basically whole groups, whole teams of developers, commercialization specialists, all the guys that find grants and who were bringing the intellectual property," recalls a person who was there during the departures" ... Uber snatched up about 50 people from Carnegie Mellon, including many from its highest ranks.
... the deal includes a "transition period" that keeps some of the departed staffers around ... "The work of these employees is very incestuous and loose," says the same NREC insider. "They are given free rein of the facilities as part-time CMU employees, but there are absolutely no checks on the work that they are doing or what [intellectual property] they are taking. Is it for CMU? Is it for Uber? None of us here know."
Edit: could CMU have gotten better IP licensing terms and ROI for the University, if they had spun out the entire team (with private financing) and had an open auction of RoboticsResearchCo to the many companies investing in this field?
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#6The whole for-profit code school thing has been giving me the creeps since I started hearing about it years ago, precisely because it's the potential employees paying for hyper-specific training. I wonder if there would be fewer outcries about a talent shortage if companies were somehow incentivized to hire these more junior people with the explicit goal of training them up to a productive level.
This should be less risky for large corps like MS, IBM etc. I believe this may already be done?
Depends on the company. I think it's done much less now than it was in the past. I know when I was hired into my first job in 2007 I barely knew their default programming language and definitely didn't know their in-house framework, so I spent the first two months in organized training and the next six or so in "on-the-job" training on a low priority production system.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#7Students aren't dealing with the proper issues that arise in a regular workplace. Many professors lack knowledge on what has been going on between them leaving the workplace and today. Because of this students are learning principles that aren't fully applicable to many business jobs today instead of learning how to deal with corporate incompetence. If companies train employees on how to deal with personnel, they will learn more of the technicalities on the job underneath a hopefully competent supervisor.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#8For the most part, bonding agreements ("you can't leave for X years without repaying us for your training") are considered exploitative and usually not legally enforceable.
As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force - if a business invests $20k in training and $80k in salary, there is nothing stopping another employer from offering $90k in salary after training is complete.
If an investment can't be protected it's pointless to make it. Having employees pay for (and be compensated for) their own training is the most reasonable workaround.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#9For the most part, bonding agreements ("you can't leave for X years without repaying us for your training") are considered exploitative and usually not legally enforceable. As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force - if a business invests $20k in training and $80k in salary, there is nothing stopping another employer from offering $90k in salary after training is complete. If an investment can't…
If you don't make the worker want to take off then it doesn't have to come to that.
Re: Business Can Pay to Train Its Own Work Force
#10Students aren't dealing with the proper issues that arise in a regular workplace. Many professors lack knowledge on what has been going on between them leaving the workplace and today. Because of this students are learning principles that aren't fully applicable to many business jobs today instead of learning how to deal with corporate incompetence. If companies train employees on how to deal with personnel, they wil…
Why should they? That's the whole argument of this piece -- that they shouldn't.