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Nobody is asking how to add numbers together. I just think you're missing the point. Whatever a competitor is willing to pay, the company that provided the tra

Nobody is asking how to add numbers together. I just think you're missing the point. Whatever a competitor is willing to pay, the company that provided the training can just pay that and not risk their employees being poached. Additionally, it isn't free to poach employees, they will have training costs no matter what. In other words, after training you raise their salary.

thedufer 11y ago
> Whatever a competitor is willing to pay, the company that provided the training can just pay that and not risk their employees being poached. Yes they can, if they want to go out of business. If I spend $20k to train a new employee, I can afford to pay them their value to me - $20k (less than that if I want to make a profit, but this is the maximum that allows me to stay in business). Meanwhile, my competitor waits 4 weeks for me to do the training and offers their full value. Now I can either let them go, or match the offer - but either way I'm down $20k, while my competitor comes out even. So you can imagine why I might not want to spend money on training. Given your other points, this is only a problem is the cost of the portion of the training that is transferable is more than the extra cost of poaching (over that of hiring a fresh employee). As the job market becomes more liquid (decreasing that poaching cost), this becomes the case more and more.
notahacker 11y ago
It isn't free to poach and onboard employees, but it's less than the cost of training in a huge number of industries, especially if the training comes with a recognised professional qualification attached to it. If I spend a large fraction of their annual salary on supporting them through a qualification I might well give them a pay rise afterwards, but a competitor able to extract similar revenue per head from trained staff can always afford to offer them a bigger pay rise after I've picked up the tab for their training. I'm only in profit whilst providing training if I can pay my staff less than their marginal revenue product for long enough to cover that overhead; ideally it would be before they've finished and got the certificate but that's not always possible. And hence, in the original example, the company providing the training ending up spending $111k on their member of staff over the course of the year to head off a competitor's $90k offer, even if the employee isn't worth $111k (Considering your original contribution to the thread was to argue the competitor wouldn't pay $111k, I think accusing me of missing the point is a bit rich...)

thedufer 11y ago

> Whatever a competitor is willing to pay, the company that provided the training can just pay that and not risk their employees being poached. Yes they can, if they want to go out of business. If I spend $20k to train a new employee, I can afford to pay them their value to me - $20k (less than that if I want to make a profit, but this is the maximum that allows me to stay in business). Meanwhile, my competitor waits 4 weeks for me to do the training and offers their full value. Now I can either let them go, or match the offer - but either way I'm down $20k, while my competitor comes out even. So you can imagine why I might not want to spend money on training. Given your other points, this is only a problem is the cost of the portion of the training that is transferable is more than the extra cost of poaching (over that of hiring a fresh employee). As the job market becomes more liquid (decreasing that poaching cost), this becomes the case more and more.

notahacker 11y ago

It isn't free to poach and onboard employees, but it's less than the cost of training in a huge number of industries, especially if the training comes with a recognised professional qualification attached to it. If I spend a large fraction of their annual salary on supporting them through a qualification I might well give them a pay rise afterwards, but a competitor able to extract similar revenue per head from trained staff can always afford to offer them a bigger pay rise after I've picked up the tab for their training. I'm only in profit whilst providing training if I can pay my staff less than their marginal revenue product for long enough to cover that overhead; ideally it would be before they've finished and got the certificate but that's not always possible. And hence, in the original example, the company providing the training ending up spending $111k on their member of staff over the course of the year to head off a competitor's $90k offer, even if the employee isn't worth $111k (Considering your original contribution to the thread was to argue the competitor wouldn't pay $111k, I think accusing me of missing the point is a bit rich...)