If your team can learn new skills and methods that are valuable for your business, you can wind up with much more effective employees. Your employees can become more efficient, take on bigger projects and generally become better at their jobs. The question that a small business owner faces, however, is whether that sort of ROI is worth paying for part or all of the education your employees need to improve.
Of course, as an employer, you’re under no obligation to pay for any training: you can throw employees into the deep end of the swimming pool and let them figure things out for themselves. But even a small amount of training can go a long way — most businesses have at least some in-house training for new employees for exactly that reason. No matter whether there is any obligation to do so, it’s worth considering how you can help your employees move forward.
Levels of Training Matter
It’s easy to think of education as something very expensive: it’s easy to start thinking in terms of helping an employee finish a degree or a similar level of education. In some cases, a college degree may be the best way for one of your employees to move forward. But in many cases, you may be looking at far less intensive (and expensive) levels of education. Maybe there is one particular class or workshop that will make a world of difference for your team. Maybe just buying a couple of books and passing them around the office will help your employees significantly.
You have to look at the specifics of the situation and your goals for your business, to really identify the educational opportunities that will help your team the most. It’s only at that point that you can really consider the cost of such education and find room in the budget for part or all of it. It is worth noting that different levels of education provide different opportunities for handling costs, as well. Buying a book is probably something you should simply do as a part of the business, but if an employee wants to pursue a degree, it’s not out of the question to offer to pay only a portion of those costs.
Keeping the Employees You’ve Helped
Simply offering a budget for training and education that is higher than the next guy’s can help keep some employees from looking for new jobs. However, it is a real concern that, if you invest in education for an employee, you’d like some level of guarantee that they aren’t going to use that additional expertise to land another job elsewhere. There are many different strategies to handle such concerns — contracts that lay out the requirements to get educational help, bonuses upon completion of a certain amount of work after completing training, etc. — but the most important factor to keep in mind is that your employees need to understand that you value their efforts and education. If education makes it possible for an employee to do more work and handle more responsibility, their salary should also demonstrate that fact.
Image by Flickr user dave_mcmt (Creative Commons)
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