Bosses: Training your workers is the best investment

Training employees scares many bosses. They worry if they spend money training workers, they’ll take their new skills to a better job elsewhere.

Maybe they will. But if you spend money wisely giving workers the right skills training investment pays off quickly.

Take an example: Microsoft Word.

Many knowledge workers spend a lot of time with Word – without ever mastering the software. A one-day training course will teach most workers everything they need to know about the program.

Training is not a cost, it is an investment

Typically a one-day out-of-office training course costs between $250 and $500 per person. You’ll also lose the person’s labour for a day.

The average Australian worker earns around A$27 an hour. In New Zealand the average hourly wage in 2009 is around NZ$25. Knowledge workers will earn more. Some earn considerably more.

So a training investment that makes employees more effective with Microsoft Word returns a dividend once you’ve saved 10 hours.

A fast pay-off

You can realistically reckon on reaching that point in two months. Probably less. What’s more, your employees will  produce higher quality documents, which will reflect better on your company. They'll be able to do more, produce more complex documents, deal better with documents and reduce errors.

Perhaps the most important pay off is in their motivation. Workers like learning skills; it boosts their self-esteem and shows them you feel they are worth investing in.

There’s another reason to spend money training your staff: The Hawthorne effect. This says that training workers has a measurable positive effect even when they learn skills they may never use.

There are no excuses. You should be training your people all the time. It's the best investment you can make.