When to Pay for Employee Training

We’re big fans of anything which helps simplify complex decisions for managers.  So it was a delight to find this helpful mental model from the engineering team at Orderbird, a German fintech company, for when a team member approaches you with a request for some training budget.

Now, we’re assuming that the request is somewhat reasonable.  It’s not wildly expensive or irrelevant.  But it is a big enough outlay in terms of time or money that it’s not a no-brainer.  A decision has to be taken.  Furthermore, there’s the nagging voice which says, ‘What if we invest in this person and then they just leave.’  

The article breaks down the decision into four options: 

It then looks at the pros and cons of each option:

As you can see, the place you definitely want to be is B, and the place you definitely don’t want to be is C.  However, what is perhaps most interesting is that A also has a positive outcome.  Only the options where you don’t invest in training have solely negative outcomes.

So when someone approaches you with a training request, and you’re unsure about investing in them, in general, it pays to offer the training. 

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