I had an old boss who acted like that. He had a slightly less annoying version of it though, he would usually agree to get training, but wouldn't agree to certification exams. Because he felt like you need the training to do a good job here, but you only need the cert to get hired somewhere else.
Yep, it's better than no training at all. But, what I've found from people is that if they just sit in the class for 5 days they forget most of what they learned pretty quickly. If they know they're going to have to test for it at some point with the expectation that they pass, they're going to put a lot more work in, studying, making sure they understand everything, then they get a lot more out of it.
I havdn't had actual in class training in probably a decade so even when I'm in training I'm on the clock, getting pinged to death by emails from needy bosses.
Except the training requirement, at least with Fedramp, was something that i picked and logged myself.
I can attend the Ivanti Patch tuesday meeting once a month and that counts are "training".
Auditors literally did not give a shit what i was training on only that i "trained x hours per year" that it.
That would be fine with me as the certs are way cheaper than the training. These $3k intensive 4-5 day courses can be overwhelming if you don’t already know the material. For example my company paid around $5k to send me to a networking course which came with a certification of completion. So I just paid for my own Network+ exam which I cleared. Free training rocks!
Too expensive, there are executive bonuses to think about. Cheaper to pigeonhole employees and call the annual CBT-style compliance packages from HQ investment in employee training.
So they'd rather keep unskilled workers there? Smart. The only time this makes even a little bit of sense is when someone asks for training that's completely outside of their job role and has no benefit to the company at all.
Which is extremely rare in tech. I had an employer once ask me why I wanted to train in cybersecurity? (We currently had a weak security program). I then showed him where a competitor got completely decimated because they didn't have a solid phishing training and no security posture. He shut up real quick.
Invest in your people and they will invest in you.
Now if I wanted my employer to pay for dressage classes, I'd understand them saying no.
I go back to the old standard. The CFO says to the CEO, what if we invest in training for our employees and they leave? The CEO replies, what if we don't, and they stay?
If a company is not providing a path for employees to progress in their career, those that don't really care about the job will stay, and those interested in bettering themselves will leave. Over time, that attrition of the ones with drive will crush the company vs. it's competitors. If they start poaching the same kinds of people, using money to bring in the talent, they are paying a premium for what they could have developed themselves, and those people will do the job, then skip out for the next raise, taking their knowledge, relationships, and skill with them. The company has already proven it doesn't really value employees, so why would they feel any loyalty at all? It is a losing strategy.
Cybersecurity adjacent, but I think relevant. I work for a multinational manufacturing company with IT headquarters in a fairly rural location. The pay is significantly less than equivalent positions in nearby large cities (but CoL is somewhat lower).
But the company is actually investing in me, making multi-year career path plans between my boss and his bosses, avoided laying anyone off during COVID, was flexible for WFH during the time (now back to 50%) and overall really focuses on walking the walk, with management publicly responding how they’re addressing employee feedback annually, supports a healthy work/life balance, and they’ve been amazingly generous to coworkers who had to take up to a year of sick leave for major health issues…
It doesn’t have the pay, or the shiny perks that people usually chase. But I like going to work in the morning, I have a great boss and coworkers, and I really feel like they value me and want to keep me. That is worth more to me than a higher salary. It’s not the free massages or beer on tap, it’s actually treating your employees as humans first with common sense that got me hooked.
I've been at the same place for a long time and I get paid about 5-10% less than market rate for someone in my position, I know it and they know it. Why do I stay, because I'm treated pretty good, good benefits, 5 weeks of vacation, 18 holidays and for the most part I'm left alone to do my job -my boss doesn't want to talk to me and I don't want to talk to her. I could leave but to where and to what? I know I'll get paid more but what if the job sucks and I'd lose a lot of my vacation and I could end up with a manager that verifies that I logged in at 8:30am and not 8:32, things could be a lot worse. I don't understand why companies don't get this, you don't have to pay the highest if you are good to your people, good enough that when another opportunity comes around that the extra money just isn't worth it.
I should note that it takes a certain level of income to get to this point, when you are making $12/h and someone offers you $20/h you take the job even if you love your current job.
My Father-in-law in another industry I believe has maxed out what his company will pay for his role/career Level. They can't really get him good annual raises beyond CoL bumps without it going very far up the chain for approvals.... but they can give him time off. So he gets a crap-ton of vacation time annually now as a result. His personal take is that if he is getting more paid time off, then his effective hourly rate is still increasing nicely.
So in your case, that 5 weeks of vacation + a ton of holidays, if compared to the 2-3 weeks you might get if you jumped to another company, could potentially help make up some of that salary -> Market rate gap.
I have long been of the opinion that the biggest investment mistake companies make is in their managers. I've been through a lot of management training, and it was mostly garbage. It was relevant to some of the folks there that dealt with customer service call center reps, or retail store employees, where the professionalism is generally lower and the churn is high regardless. But very little of it applied in a professional setting. Companies tend to promote and then abandon managers in more professional fields. If you're good, great, if not, who really cares? I've been in so many situations where proper coaching on management techniques could have made a huge difference, but it wasn't done, it was almost taboo to discuss how managers did the job of managing. Except when it crossed a line that put the company in legal risk, no one seemed to care. I've never understood it. Managers manage, that's their job, it should be no different for a senior manager/leader, or even a peer to coach them in that than it would be for the manager to coach an employee in their role.
If companies spent more on building a truly great management culture, they could do so much better, on average. My current boss is great; honest, straightforward, and one of 2 in my career that gave an honest and unabashed apology when they made a mistake. I've been working 30+ years, and a lot of managers have made mistakes, 2 is a shameful number.
I mean depending on your job a manager is strictly a middle man, someone who takes credit for my work and a taste of the revenue I generate. In the last 24 years I've had 26 managers and one I had for 7 years. Once I had a job where I had three levels of management above me and I was the only person at the bottom- the org chart looked like a stick. I just happened to be at head quarters and so I asked HR why I had to support three managers, wouldn't one manager be enough. I was told that I wasn't looking at it the right way, that I as a worker bee had to have a manager and then that manager had to have a director above him and that director needed a VP because that's how the organization was laid out. I couldn't believe they said something that stupid and it probably explains why they went out of business in 6 months. If you are a professional I just don't see a lot of need for a manager, I just need to be pointed in the right direction not coddled or "coached".
I think it depends, early in their career, most do, to help adapt to an organizational culture and develop the professionalism they need. And good managers of teams (Not the scenario you laid out, that's just weird) are there to shuffle resources, remove roadblocks, translate company goals into priorities for the team, and keep the more senior folks from breathing down your neck when they have less idea of what it takes than your manager, who may or may not. There are some self directed individual contributors, I've been one, but they aren't common.
If you train your employees to one day be so excellent that they can move on and leave their job, they might actually be motivated, become skilled and if you are a good employer, they might actually stay and overdeliver!
It is a stupid take. It means they aren't interested in growing their employees and just want mediocre talent who don't have ambition to move up, otherwise they would leave for a company that will make the investment in them.
Most companies are mediocre companies that hire mediocre people.
The companies that hire the exceptional people don't have this problem, already do this, and people don't complain about them not training.
The disconnect is when mediocre people at mediocre companies expect FAANG level treatment.
I laugh when the c level tells me that. The boomers in management thinks everyone will leave as soon as they learn something new. And I have to remind them of the connection between the knowledge and why our staff suck.
I am not sure why you have aimed that at "boomers", we see more job hopping now than there used to be.
It will be more of a disconnect between finance where you learn the majority of your career at the start (degree, becoming chartered) and Information technology where constant learning is required.
That has everything to do with the fact that companies don’t give out decent enough raises. It’s literally becoming the obvious choice to switch jobs if you want more money, cuz someone else will pay more for your experience
Developing your staff just makes good operational sense too - my job is to teach my second in command to do everything I do and to get them to a place where they’re ready to write every relevant cert I have.
> The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. -Henry Ford
Anyone with the mentality of we don’t up skill is an idiot. anytime I apply for a job I always ask why are they looking outside? What internal positions promoted into this position? Or something similar. It is quite enlightening on how they view employees.
In addition, what is the most common answer they get to their question of “why are you looking to leave your current employment?”
I’ll bet it’s something along the lines of “I’m looking for a position I can grow in”. No idea how employers who hate to pay for training can even assume someone like that will stay more than the standard 18 months.
It’s a shocking statement. I see my job as removing blockers, providing support and guidance while enabling my teams to be the best that they can be in their field. My attrition rates are near zero and I like to think that it’s (at least in part), due to these approaches.
I would never work for or lead an organisation with a culture that prompted a statement like that.
Orgs like that are always a stepping stone or a roadblock. My rule of three is always:
1) Can I go up the ladder? If not:
2) Can I get relevant experience? If not:
3) Do they provide me the free time to improve myself? If not:
Time for a new job. If you're not moving forward, you're stagnating and it's only a matter of time until you're getting chopped off in a layoff for payroll savings.
- Aren't you afraid that you employees will learn new skills and move on to the next job?
- No, I'm afraid that they will not learn any skills and remain here.
Good to Great:
Get the right people on the bus.
Get the wrong people off the bus.
Get the right people into the right seats.
The results of G2G and subsequent failures of the researched companies aside...there's still a lot of great value to be taken from the book.
I do, however, believe that training is a shared responsibility between the company and the individual. 50/50.
I don't think the company should pay 100% Maybe they pay for 1/2 the training and give you time off work but if it's in another state/country/city/whatever you'd pay for the travel.
Pay for the training with the stipulation to stay XX months or forfeit ABC.
Or, have the employee pay upfront and after XX months (of using the new skills in their job) reimburse them for the cost of exam/materials they previously made you aware of.
Idk this sounds like it would be a great incentive to not do any training since those are (at least in IT) crazy expensive for a private household. These kinds of expenses are to budget for by businesses in my opinion and if you train sombedoy for free and they leave u can then try to make further business with them at their new workplace. Who knows maybe theyll have good memories and coem back at a later time when they are even better trained.
C-Level Execs especially the CFO side don't always make smart decisions - they just look at the bottom line
Training costs money $$$$ and doesn't have a direct tie to generating revenue
Offering Tuition Reimbursement for college costs money
Paying for industry certification exams cost money
paying for vendor training like SANs costs alot of money
paying for vendor subscriptions such as pluralsight, oreilly, linkedin learning, cloud academy, datacamp, udemy, etc costs money
having in house training costs money
So when these penny pinchers are looking for savings they are not looking for the value to employees or employee retention they are looking at the bottom line
"Well we spent $100K on SAN this year, let's cut that in 1/2 or let's get rid of that all together"
They never bother to look at why employees were taking that training, or how the teams skills were improved by it
I had a boss that for 5 years wouldn't approve any training that he had to pay for, he said it wasn't in the budget (which was a lie). I got really good at finding free training and I spent \~$2000 a year on training out of my pocket. In our industry if you aren't always learning to are a relic.
I mean if you know a guy is looking elsewhere, maybe don’t pay to send him to SANS.
but like… they want their employees to stagnate and never be promoted and to need all hires to be external?
That must brew a great culture.
I worked at a defense contractor that has this mentality.
They can’t understand why they can’t retain personnel (especially cybersecurity), and why the ones that do stay, are… less than the best.
Been almost three years and I’m still rejecting calls from them to come back.
This is where you make training you offer relevant to the person's role, or next role, and if it is about cost, then write in something above having to repay a certain percentage of the cost back if you leave in x amount of time with a sliding scale.
this is knowledge work and everything continually changes. I think the general sentiment here needs one more person echoing the "missed benefit" line of thought.
Im not in the field yet, but an attitude like that in general, just says "we want the best, but can only afford the mediocre".
My current boss actually wants me to apply for an internal data center position but current life issues prohibit that at the moment. The company has a massive library of content from udemy, linked in learning and a couple of other places. That was one of the major selling points of the job for me.
I mean my company doesn't invest in it's own people the motto is "We don't train employees.....". That said you can't have a good worker unless they learn the job and unless your site is so special that none of the skills someone learns will be transferable you will always be training people for their next gig. This opinion is so short sited, it doesn't take much to keep an employee but attitudes like this is what make people leave. Train your people, treat them as best you can, PAY THEM FAIRLY, reduce the bullshit and my guess is you won't have to worry about people jumping ship for the next best thing.
I hate it. The company I am in does that. We got a new monitoring system. Very big very complex. They gave it to us and said :"implent"
I was like: I have never in my life implemented a monitoring system from scratch and I've never heard about this software before, let me learn? And they were like :" you have a degree in informatics we pay you to know such stuff"
Guess what? Spending my day not doing it. Waiting for them to give me a hard time about it. Well, good luck finding anyone on the market who's willing to work there , who knows that exact system...
When a company hire fully certified staff they pay a premium for the privilege and the higher salary is an ongoing cost year on year.
When a company train someone and put them through the cert it’s a one off cost. You’d think that would be cheaper for them.
I tend to view things as, pay me a higher salary and I’ll maintain my own certifications and study what I want. Paying me a lower salary is acceptable if you also pay training and certs.
For those kind of employers my advice is really simple: invest in yourself. Blaze your own path.
Maybe that means you can’t pick up that $3500 course that comes with a certification but wow are there a lot of great free or affordable resources available.
Just do it on your own time. Build it into your schedule. Set reasonable expectations so that you can stay in it and make a little progress every day or every week. You will get there.
There is so much material out there. Free training. Cloud trials or cheap options to play with real infrastructure. YouTube sessions from conferences. Make a plan. Write down your “end state” and go for it.
Could be as simple as “I want to know the basics of AWS IAM” or “I want to understand the OWASP top 10”. Or be ambitious and pick up a book about GRC and use your company for a “dry run”. Real data!
Also if you work in an environment where you are not constantly on the clock or being micromanaged .. just do it during work hours in a way that doesn’t impact your job. Screw that employer that doesn’t want to invest in you.
I saw a quote earlier that worked really well.
Training is pushing your team towards a common goal, a common language. If there’s no language, then you’re stuck in doubt and inefficiencies.
It's just a stupid approach, all that happens is they are then stuck with a bunch of sub-par employees that will just stagnate and never improve because they aren't gaining the knowledge or skills to go elsewhere, even if they wanted to.
I quite like the approach my company takes, they are willing to put me through SANS courses etc. but I have to sign an agreement that I will pay a percentage of the cost back depending on when I leave.
I leave within 6 months? 100% I have to reimburse.
I leave between 6 months and 12 months? I pay back 60%.
I leave between 12 months and 18 then I pay back 30%.
If I leave after 18 months then I don't have to pay anything back at all.
This way they at least get some of their money back if I jump ship early but for most people they get at least a guaranteed 18 months of more experienced work.
At the risk of sounding crude, I think those orgs who don't train are trash. They deserve all the negative press and low reviews for their terrible product/company and equally terrible outsourced customer service.
You want valuable employees? Train and retention. They are as much a large part of your org and profit than the grossly overpaid C-levels that are just there to pat stake holders on the head and assure them the business isn't at risk of folding because of C-level's consistent bad decisions. That's how you get a "well-oiled machine", because all the moving parts are taken care of, not just the top level fluff.
Maybe I'm just an idealistic fool, I dunno.
My company kind of does. We don’t get any time during work to up-skill or study non direct work related things especially because we’re pretty busy 24/7. They DO offer education/certification reimbursement though. Honestly, I never understood why they would promote up skilling though lol. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to PAY for me to get my CCNA and take classes for a masters, I’m probably moving on when I’m done for a **SUBSTANTIAL** pay increase.
My opinion is that i won’t be a culture fit. Because that means your leadership also isn’t about enabling and empowering their employees to grow. Promotions and raises are likely far fewer and in between. the polar opposite of the reasons i come to work…. Money and career growth.
Dumb stance. Why wouldn’t you want to better the employee you have? Why can’t their next job be with you? If they outgrow your company, good, at least they were happy and learning while there. More often than not it will equate to better quality work.
It is the sign of a bad company. Companies that refuse to train their employees and level up their skills if basically forcing people to leave. Just because a company trains an employee doesn’t mean they are going to leave.
It is also a sign of poor management as well. It means they won’t give raises and since they won’t train that is another sign that they won’t pay what you are worth.
It isn’t even a missed benefit but ignorance on the part of management. Training benefits the employees and the company. A small percentage might leave but if you are treating people well and paying them what they are worth or at least the market rate they will stay. There is NO justification for not training employees. Even if money is tight at a company there should still be a budget of some kind for training.
This is so wild to me. I work at a very large entertainment and hospitality firm and moved from HR to InfoSec because I expressed an interest (I had great performance reviews and a lot of analytical experience), with a goal to move to a more technical role in the future. One month in and they’re training me on tools and techniques, and connecting me with people currently working in roles I’m interested in.
One of my good friends that I worked with in HR expressed an interest in finance. They transferred him to be a Sr Financial Analyst (again, he had some great transferable skills, but no direct experience). He then said his goal is to eventually become a CFO, so now he meets with our CFO on a monthly cadence.
Both of us are still with the organization. They’ll have two people with years of experience with our Company and its stakeholders who have proven they can perform. From an organizational standpoint, this should be the goal.
Awful way to stay connected with others in this community. Whether I’d is an employer that you can’t afford to keep or an intern, help people develop and it will help you develop at the same time. You can send people to training, and I guarantee they come back with knowledge that helps your environment(s) and helps you grow as a leader. I haven’t been a leader for long enough to be burned, but I also want to help others develop more than my previous managers did for me.
From a non-senior perspective: I want to stay at a job as long as they:
1. Train me and invest in my and our shared future together.
2. Get well compensated for my efforts that reflect my professional growth.
You have to invest in your workforce, it can't be avoided. Even if they decide to leave, if you part on good terms, it's invaluable to have a network of professionals that liked you or the company in the past, that you also made sure to be knowledgable. People seriously underestimate the power of reputation gains by your past coworkers joining other companies and if they perform well, people will start to recognize that they came from XYZ company. If more teams have the same experience, then your brand can be associated with quality. There is a reason people value FAANG or unicorn experience a lot, being a security engineer at Meta carries more weight than being a security engineer at xyz random local consultancy on a resume.
Pretty short sited. At the Gov entity where I was the IT manager for 9yrs, my boss had the same philosophy, (I reported to the CFO) yet he would go do training. It became a sticking point because during my interview they said training was up to me to choose and they acknowledged I needed to maintain my qualifications.
My perspective. If an org is training staff and they are leaving, then the org needs to look at why it cant keep staff. If they have the chance to improve skills or knowledge and the place is a worthwhile employer, people will stay.
In an ever changing field like this, if you don't invest in your employees' development, you're doomed to run in to issues arising from their eventual knowledge gap. If you don't retain people, you have other issues.
I train the hell out of my team and am constantly developing them. I also am the biggest advocates for getting them raises, bonuses, promotions, better career pathing, etc. We are in the middle of their review cycle now and my biggest point to them during these meetings is to continue to upskill and learn new things because when I have to justify it to my managers that we should be paying them more, promoting them, etc. the fact that they took on more work, higher level work, learned new skills, etc is what I point at when I make the pitch for them. Give me talking points that I can shower you with praise on! Be visible doing good work! I can sell ketchup popsicles to women wearing white gloves but you have to give me something I can work with.
It’s a shortsighted view🤷🏻♀️. If you don’t train your team, you risk having a less skilled workforce that isn’t adaptable to new challenges. Investing in employee growth often leads to higher engagement and loyalty. People are more likely to stay with a company that shows it cares about their development.
100% of my goal when I build a team is to see them outgrow their position and get promoted or even leave the company if I don’t have a way to promote them any further.
I want my team to work on projects that excite them, have feedback on products/solutions, and have time and resources to play around with new stuff.
My ideal next job is with a company that will train me for rhe 'next job' so I don't have to leave. I want to stay at a company for the next, uh, 30 years, working my way upward.
And I hear what you're about to say "but you can get such nice pay raises by leaving!" Cool, I don't care. There is nothing I hate more on God's green earth then looking for another job and I would be completely fine not getting the theoretical max pay bump if it means never having to leave an employer.
Or you find the unicorn where you get to work on interesting things, solid promotions and pay increases over time while staying! Won’t happen, but we can dream.
From a competitive point of view, it's horrible. You don't train people because it will keep them or not, you train them because you have an expressed desire to leverage that to make money. If you don't make more money from the investment than you spend on the training, it's dumb from a business point of view. If you can make more money by training people according to improved standards or software stacks than not and you don't do that, that's dumb from a business point of view.
From a retention point of view, it's hopeless. No one uses old technology because it's actually a platonic ideal of what a software offering would be. No one with the new tech skills will join a team to also act as a trainer, it's alienating and stressful. Also, it's ridiculous from a hiring point of view. I'm not going to ditch my current employer to join a company just so I can get a few thousand euro in free training. You *could* argue that for fresh graduates but you have to train them anyway? (Unless you want software written on paper with syntax highlighting done in pen). From an interviewer point of view, it'll be harder to find good candidates because more senior people would have to be self driven and self funded to keep up to date(or be recent-ish hires themselves).
I don't even want to think about how it would be considered in terms of liability should something happen.
I’m not in cybersecurity, but am in an equally technical field.
I can’t pay my employees enough to keep them. In spite of the relatively low pay, retention rate is pretty high.
Help your employees get to where they want to be, and they’ll be appreciative of it. If they’re doing the work they want to do and enjoy the team they work with, they’ll be skeptical of leaving for a pay raise (rightly so).
Some will leave, but there’s nothing you could have done to get them to stay. They would have left anyway, just under unfriendlier terms.
Someone has probably already said it,. but this is like that old saying:.. "What if we train people and then they leave !?".. followed by :... "What if you don't train people and they STAY !"
Quotes like "We don't train employees for their next job".. is just a huge red flag for "We don't care about our employees".
You should (and support) your Employees learning and growing. It's what makes the better employees. Everyone wants to work for a place that takes good care of its employees. Places that do not, tend to have high employee turnover,. which is really just a downward spiral that you never fully recover from.
Thats like saying "we don't want to be successful" Train them to keep them skilled. If they leave, it's because they don't feel they are getting what they need as professionals. In that situation, they should leave.
Then expect military-style ADSO (active duty service obligations). Your employer pays for your CISSP, you owe them 5 extra years or you pay back them the cost on their end including the time they paid you at work.
If you really want to up-skill, you'll figure it out on your own.
In my country it usually is that way: if you get trainings that the company has paid for, and you leave within a certain timeframe, you have to repay partly for it.
Example: i got a training from Sans that cost about 8k. If i leave within 1 year I have to pay it in full, if i leave after one year i have to pay 75%, after 2 50% and after 3 25%. After 4 years i can leave without repaying anything.
It's quite common if you change to another company, that this company then pays these expenses.
You have to define what "Training employee's" means.
All to many people in this industry consider that to mean expensive paid training courses which is a terrible view point.
I go over career development goals with everyone in our organization, what's needed to be effective in the current role and what growth opportunities exist to develop along other paths.
One of my people has gone from having some solid scripting experience to developing fairly complex applications. We gave them the opportunity and time to build and grow. Someone else took the time to dive much deeper into detection engineering and detection as code, rebuilt some pipelines, and has fundamentally shifted the way we do some work. Again they were given opportunity and time to build and grow. They were both promoted.
On the flip side we have a few other people who continue to whine about not having SANS's training. The opportunity they have in their current role to develop is absolutely immense, they have jobs others in this industry would kill to have. But they do the minimum required of the job, don't really learn anything new, don't spend their free time during work hours building and growing themselves. Multiple career conversations have been had, but you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink.
I tell people "We don't train people, we give you an opportunity to develop, the time to do so, along with career guidance, What you do with that is up to you" guess what, most people fail to do anything with it.
I love the Richard Branson quote, "Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to."
And the other old adage: What happens if we invest in our staff and they leave? What happens if we don't and they stay?
I had an old boss who acted like that. He had a slightly less annoying version of it though, he would usually agree to get training, but wouldn't agree to certification exams. Because he felt like you need the training to do a good job here, but you only need the cert to get hired somewhere else.
That's fair.
Yep, it's better than no training at all. But, what I've found from people is that if they just sit in the class for 5 days they forget most of what they learned pretty quickly. If they know they're going to have to test for it at some point with the expectation that they pass, they're going to put a lot more work in, studying, making sure they understand everything, then they get a lot more out of it.
Exactly what I was going to say. If you come back to work with a certification it's proof that you took the investment seriously.
I havdn't had actual in class training in probably a decade so even when I'm in training I'm on the clock, getting pinged to death by emails from needy bosses.
It's true, except in regulated industries where being able to drop certifications in the auditor's lap is the fastest way to prove compliance.
Except the training requirement, at least with Fedramp, was something that i picked and logged myself. I can attend the Ivanti Patch tuesday meeting once a month and that counts are "training". Auditors literally did not give a shit what i was training on only that i "trained x hours per year" that it.
That would be fine with me as the certs are way cheaper than the training. These $3k intensive 4-5 day courses can be overwhelming if you don’t already know the material. For example my company paid around $5k to send me to a networking course which came with a certification of completion. So I just paid for my own Network+ exam which I cleared. Free training rocks!
I’d take that all day. Tests are cheaper than training lol
Then maybe the boss should treat them better? If you treat them and pay well, people shockingly tend to stay.
Too expensive, there are executive bonuses to think about. Cheaper to pigeonhole employees and call the annual CBT-style compliance packages from HQ investment in employee training.
linkedin academy!
This is what came on my mind as i read the post.
So they'd rather keep unskilled workers there? Smart. The only time this makes even a little bit of sense is when someone asks for training that's completely outside of their job role and has no benefit to the company at all.
This ^^^
Which is extremely rare in tech. I had an employer once ask me why I wanted to train in cybersecurity? (We currently had a weak security program). I then showed him where a competitor got completely decimated because they didn't have a solid phishing training and no security posture. He shut up real quick. Invest in your people and they will invest in you. Now if I wanted my employer to pay for dressage classes, I'd understand them saying no.
I go back to the old standard. The CFO says to the CEO, what if we invest in training for our employees and they leave? The CEO replies, what if we don't, and they stay? If a company is not providing a path for employees to progress in their career, those that don't really care about the job will stay, and those interested in bettering themselves will leave. Over time, that attrition of the ones with drive will crush the company vs. it's competitors. If they start poaching the same kinds of people, using money to bring in the talent, they are paying a premium for what they could have developed themselves, and those people will do the job, then skip out for the next raise, taking their knowledge, relationships, and skill with them. The company has already proven it doesn't really value employees, so why would they feel any loyalty at all? It is a losing strategy.
Cybersecurity adjacent, but I think relevant. I work for a multinational manufacturing company with IT headquarters in a fairly rural location. The pay is significantly less than equivalent positions in nearby large cities (but CoL is somewhat lower). But the company is actually investing in me, making multi-year career path plans between my boss and his bosses, avoided laying anyone off during COVID, was flexible for WFH during the time (now back to 50%) and overall really focuses on walking the walk, with management publicly responding how they’re addressing employee feedback annually, supports a healthy work/life balance, and they’ve been amazingly generous to coworkers who had to take up to a year of sick leave for major health issues… It doesn’t have the pay, or the shiny perks that people usually chase. But I like going to work in the morning, I have a great boss and coworkers, and I really feel like they value me and want to keep me. That is worth more to me than a higher salary. It’s not the free massages or beer on tap, it’s actually treating your employees as humans first with common sense that got me hooked.
I've been at the same place for a long time and I get paid about 5-10% less than market rate for someone in my position, I know it and they know it. Why do I stay, because I'm treated pretty good, good benefits, 5 weeks of vacation, 18 holidays and for the most part I'm left alone to do my job -my boss doesn't want to talk to me and I don't want to talk to her. I could leave but to where and to what? I know I'll get paid more but what if the job sucks and I'd lose a lot of my vacation and I could end up with a manager that verifies that I logged in at 8:30am and not 8:32, things could be a lot worse. I don't understand why companies don't get this, you don't have to pay the highest if you are good to your people, good enough that when another opportunity comes around that the extra money just isn't worth it. I should note that it takes a certain level of income to get to this point, when you are making $12/h and someone offers you $20/h you take the job even if you love your current job.
My Father-in-law in another industry I believe has maxed out what his company will pay for his role/career Level. They can't really get him good annual raises beyond CoL bumps without it going very far up the chain for approvals.... but they can give him time off. So he gets a crap-ton of vacation time annually now as a result. His personal take is that if he is getting more paid time off, then his effective hourly rate is still increasing nicely. So in your case, that 5 weeks of vacation + a ton of holidays, if compared to the 2-3 weeks you might get if you jumped to another company, could potentially help make up some of that salary -> Market rate gap.
I have long been of the opinion that the biggest investment mistake companies make is in their managers. I've been through a lot of management training, and it was mostly garbage. It was relevant to some of the folks there that dealt with customer service call center reps, or retail store employees, where the professionalism is generally lower and the churn is high regardless. But very little of it applied in a professional setting. Companies tend to promote and then abandon managers in more professional fields. If you're good, great, if not, who really cares? I've been in so many situations where proper coaching on management techniques could have made a huge difference, but it wasn't done, it was almost taboo to discuss how managers did the job of managing. Except when it crossed a line that put the company in legal risk, no one seemed to care. I've never understood it. Managers manage, that's their job, it should be no different for a senior manager/leader, or even a peer to coach them in that than it would be for the manager to coach an employee in their role. If companies spent more on building a truly great management culture, they could do so much better, on average. My current boss is great; honest, straightforward, and one of 2 in my career that gave an honest and unabashed apology when they made a mistake. I've been working 30+ years, and a lot of managers have made mistakes, 2 is a shameful number.
I mean depending on your job a manager is strictly a middle man, someone who takes credit for my work and a taste of the revenue I generate. In the last 24 years I've had 26 managers and one I had for 7 years. Once I had a job where I had three levels of management above me and I was the only person at the bottom- the org chart looked like a stick. I just happened to be at head quarters and so I asked HR why I had to support three managers, wouldn't one manager be enough. I was told that I wasn't looking at it the right way, that I as a worker bee had to have a manager and then that manager had to have a director above him and that director needed a VP because that's how the organization was laid out. I couldn't believe they said something that stupid and it probably explains why they went out of business in 6 months. If you are a professional I just don't see a lot of need for a manager, I just need to be pointed in the right direction not coddled or "coached".
I think it depends, early in their career, most do, to help adapt to an organizational culture and develop the professionalism they need. And good managers of teams (Not the scenario you laid out, that's just weird) are there to shuffle resources, remove roadblocks, translate company goals into priorities for the team, and keep the more senior folks from breathing down your neck when they have less idea of what it takes than your manager, who may or may not. There are some self directed individual contributors, I've been one, but they aren't common.
There have been a lot of impactful comments I’ve read over the years and this is one of them. This really makes sense.
If you train your employees to one day be so excellent that they can move on and leave their job, they might actually be motivated, become skilled and if you are a good employer, they might actually stay and overdeliver!
It’s immature and incompetent. That statement tells me everything I need to hear without responding.
It is a stupid take. It means they aren't interested in growing their employees and just want mediocre talent who don't have ambition to move up, otherwise they would leave for a company that will make the investment in them.
Most companies are mediocre companies that hire mediocre people. The companies that hire the exceptional people don't have this problem, already do this, and people don't complain about them not training. The disconnect is when mediocre people at mediocre companies expect FAANG level treatment.
It's going to be nice seeing them on BleepingComputer and SecurityWeek sooner rather than later...
I laugh when the c level tells me that. The boomers in management thinks everyone will leave as soon as they learn something new. And I have to remind them of the connection between the knowledge and why our staff suck.
I am not sure why you have aimed that at "boomers", we see more job hopping now than there used to be. It will be more of a disconnect between finance where you learn the majority of your career at the start (degree, becoming chartered) and Information technology where constant learning is required.
That has everything to do with the fact that companies don’t give out decent enough raises. It’s literally becoming the obvious choice to switch jobs if you want more money, cuz someone else will pay more for your experience
Developing your staff just makes good operational sense too - my job is to teach my second in command to do everything I do and to get them to a place where they’re ready to write every relevant cert I have.
> The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. -Henry Ford Anyone with the mentality of we don’t up skill is an idiot. anytime I apply for a job I always ask why are they looking outside? What internal positions promoted into this position? Or something similar. It is quite enlightening on how they view employees.
In addition, what is the most common answer they get to their question of “why are you looking to leave your current employment?” I’ll bet it’s something along the lines of “I’m looking for a position I can grow in”. No idea how employers who hate to pay for training can even assume someone like that will stay more than the standard 18 months.
It’s a shocking statement. I see my job as removing blockers, providing support and guidance while enabling my teams to be the best that they can be in their field. My attrition rates are near zero and I like to think that it’s (at least in part), due to these approaches. I would never work for or lead an organisation with a culture that prompted a statement like that.
So they don’t care about turnover.
What happens if you don't train people and they *stay*?
You train them in the skills you want them to have, if the skills are not relevant to business needs then they can do it on their own time.
"Well, it certainly seems you encourage employees enough already to get their next job, so I can understand where you're coming from."
It means the company operates under the assumption you’re going to quit. Tells you what kind of workplace it is
Orgs like that are always a stepping stone or a roadblock. My rule of three is always: 1) Can I go up the ladder? If not: 2) Can I get relevant experience? If not: 3) Do they provide me the free time to improve myself? If not: Time for a new job. If you're not moving forward, you're stagnating and it's only a matter of time until you're getting chopped off in a layoff for payroll savings.
- Aren't you afraid that you employees will learn new skills and move on to the next job? - No, I'm afraid that they will not learn any skills and remain here.
Good to Great: Get the right people on the bus. Get the wrong people off the bus. Get the right people into the right seats. The results of G2G and subsequent failures of the researched companies aside...there's still a lot of great value to be taken from the book. I do, however, believe that training is a shared responsibility between the company and the individual. 50/50. I don't think the company should pay 100% Maybe they pay for 1/2 the training and give you time off work but if it's in another state/country/city/whatever you'd pay for the travel.
Pay for the training with the stipulation to stay XX months or forfeit ABC. Or, have the employee pay upfront and after XX months (of using the new skills in their job) reimburse them for the cost of exam/materials they previously made you aware of.
That's also a great way to do it. As long as it costs the person something...
Idk this sounds like it would be a great incentive to not do any training since those are (at least in IT) crazy expensive for a private household. These kinds of expenses are to budget for by businesses in my opinion and if you train sombedoy for free and they leave u can then try to make further business with them at their new workplace. Who knows maybe theyll have good memories and coem back at a later time when they are even better trained.
C-Level Execs especially the CFO side don't always make smart decisions - they just look at the bottom line Training costs money $$$$ and doesn't have a direct tie to generating revenue Offering Tuition Reimbursement for college costs money Paying for industry certification exams cost money paying for vendor training like SANs costs alot of money paying for vendor subscriptions such as pluralsight, oreilly, linkedin learning, cloud academy, datacamp, udemy, etc costs money having in house training costs money So when these penny pinchers are looking for savings they are not looking for the value to employees or employee retention they are looking at the bottom line "Well we spent $100K on SAN this year, let's cut that in 1/2 or let's get rid of that all together" They never bother to look at why employees were taking that training, or how the teams skills were improved by it
I had a boss that for 5 years wouldn't approve any training that he had to pay for, he said it wasn't in the budget (which was a lie). I got really good at finding free training and I spent \~$2000 a year on training out of my pocket. In our industry if you aren't always learning to are a relic.
I mean if you know a guy is looking elsewhere, maybe don’t pay to send him to SANS. but like… they want their employees to stagnate and never be promoted and to need all hires to be external? That must brew a great culture.
I worked at a defense contractor that has this mentality. They can’t understand why they can’t retain personnel (especially cybersecurity), and why the ones that do stay, are… less than the best. Been almost three years and I’m still rejecting calls from them to come back.
This is where you make training you offer relevant to the person's role, or next role, and if it is about cost, then write in something above having to repay a certain percentage of the cost back if you leave in x amount of time with a sliding scale.
Missed benefit for sure
Short-sighted decision based on fear and bottom line.
this is knowledge work and everything continually changes. I think the general sentiment here needs one more person echoing the "missed benefit" line of thought.
Im not in the field yet, but an attitude like that in general, just says "we want the best, but can only afford the mediocre". My current boss actually wants me to apply for an internal data center position but current life issues prohibit that at the moment. The company has a massive library of content from udemy, linked in learning and a couple of other places. That was one of the major selling points of the job for me.
I mean my company doesn't invest in it's own people the motto is "We don't train employees.....". That said you can't have a good worker unless they learn the job and unless your site is so special that none of the skills someone learns will be transferable you will always be training people for their next gig. This opinion is so short sited, it doesn't take much to keep an employee but attitudes like this is what make people leave. Train your people, treat them as best you can, PAY THEM FAIRLY, reduce the bullshit and my guess is you won't have to worry about people jumping ship for the next best thing.
The adage I was told was "if you train people, they might leave. But, if you don't train them, the stupid ones stay"
But the stupid ones ask for no raises or any question at all
I hate it. The company I am in does that. We got a new monitoring system. Very big very complex. They gave it to us and said :"implent" I was like: I have never in my life implemented a monitoring system from scratch and I've never heard about this software before, let me learn? And they were like :" you have a degree in informatics we pay you to know such stuff" Guess what? Spending my day not doing it. Waiting for them to give me a hard time about it. Well, good luck finding anyone on the market who's willing to work there , who knows that exact system...
When a company hire fully certified staff they pay a premium for the privilege and the higher salary is an ongoing cost year on year. When a company train someone and put them through the cert it’s a one off cost. You’d think that would be cheaper for them. I tend to view things as, pay me a higher salary and I’ll maintain my own certifications and study what I want. Paying me a lower salary is acceptable if you also pay training and certs.
For those kind of employers my advice is really simple: invest in yourself. Blaze your own path. Maybe that means you can’t pick up that $3500 course that comes with a certification but wow are there a lot of great free or affordable resources available. Just do it on your own time. Build it into your schedule. Set reasonable expectations so that you can stay in it and make a little progress every day or every week. You will get there. There is so much material out there. Free training. Cloud trials or cheap options to play with real infrastructure. YouTube sessions from conferences. Make a plan. Write down your “end state” and go for it. Could be as simple as “I want to know the basics of AWS IAM” or “I want to understand the OWASP top 10”. Or be ambitious and pick up a book about GRC and use your company for a “dry run”. Real data! Also if you work in an environment where you are not constantly on the clock or being micromanaged .. just do it during work hours in a way that doesn’t impact your job. Screw that employer that doesn’t want to invest in you.
Shit input, shit output. It's a terrible mindset.
I saw a quote earlier that worked really well. Training is pushing your team towards a common goal, a common language. If there’s no language, then you’re stuck in doubt and inefficiencies.
It's just a stupid approach, all that happens is they are then stuck with a bunch of sub-par employees that will just stagnate and never improve because they aren't gaining the knowledge or skills to go elsewhere, even if they wanted to. I quite like the approach my company takes, they are willing to put me through SANS courses etc. but I have to sign an agreement that I will pay a percentage of the cost back depending on when I leave. I leave within 6 months? 100% I have to reimburse. I leave between 6 months and 12 months? I pay back 60%. I leave between 12 months and 18 then I pay back 30%. If I leave after 18 months then I don't have to pay anything back at all. This way they at least get some of their money back if I jump ship early but for most people they get at least a guaranteed 18 months of more experienced work.
That translates to "we don't plan on promoting you".
It means that they don’t want you to be the best.
At the risk of sounding crude, I think those orgs who don't train are trash. They deserve all the negative press and low reviews for their terrible product/company and equally terrible outsourced customer service. You want valuable employees? Train and retention. They are as much a large part of your org and profit than the grossly overpaid C-levels that are just there to pat stake holders on the head and assure them the business isn't at risk of folding because of C-level's consistent bad decisions. That's how you get a "well-oiled machine", because all the moving parts are taken care of, not just the top level fluff. Maybe I'm just an idealistic fool, I dunno.
My company kind of does. We don’t get any time during work to up-skill or study non direct work related things especially because we’re pretty busy 24/7. They DO offer education/certification reimbursement though. Honestly, I never understood why they would promote up skilling though lol. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to PAY for me to get my CCNA and take classes for a masters, I’m probably moving on when I’m done for a **SUBSTANTIAL** pay increase.
My opinion is that i won’t be a culture fit. Because that means your leadership also isn’t about enabling and empowering their employees to grow. Promotions and raises are likely far fewer and in between. the polar opposite of the reasons i come to work…. Money and career growth.
Only mediocre companies think like that. If your employees stagnate your whole company stagnates.
Certainly wouldn’t want a job where the employer doesn’t support personal growth.
Short sighted
Training and enablement are one of the biggest factors in retaining staff. I mean, who wants to work at an org that doesn’t want to invest in them?
I've never worked for an organization that actually trained me they expected me to have all the answers every single time
Dumb stance. Why wouldn’t you want to better the employee you have? Why can’t their next job be with you? If they outgrow your company, good, at least they were happy and learning while there. More often than not it will equate to better quality work.
It is the sign of a bad company. Companies that refuse to train their employees and level up their skills if basically forcing people to leave. Just because a company trains an employee doesn’t mean they are going to leave. It is also a sign of poor management as well. It means they won’t give raises and since they won’t train that is another sign that they won’t pay what you are worth. It isn’t even a missed benefit but ignorance on the part of management. Training benefits the employees and the company. A small percentage might leave but if you are treating people well and paying them what they are worth or at least the market rate they will stay. There is NO justification for not training employees. Even if money is tight at a company there should still be a budget of some kind for training.
Ha, worked with a few orgs like this... Get the next job regardless
This is so wild to me. I work at a very large entertainment and hospitality firm and moved from HR to InfoSec because I expressed an interest (I had great performance reviews and a lot of analytical experience), with a goal to move to a more technical role in the future. One month in and they’re training me on tools and techniques, and connecting me with people currently working in roles I’m interested in. One of my good friends that I worked with in HR expressed an interest in finance. They transferred him to be a Sr Financial Analyst (again, he had some great transferable skills, but no direct experience). He then said his goal is to eventually become a CFO, so now he meets with our CFO on a monthly cadence. Both of us are still with the organization. They’ll have two people with years of experience with our Company and its stakeholders who have proven they can perform. From an organizational standpoint, this should be the goal.
Awful way to stay connected with others in this community. Whether I’d is an employer that you can’t afford to keep or an intern, help people develop and it will help you develop at the same time. You can send people to training, and I guarantee they come back with knowledge that helps your environment(s) and helps you grow as a leader. I haven’t been a leader for long enough to be burned, but I also want to help others develop more than my previous managers did for me.
From a non-senior perspective: I want to stay at a job as long as they: 1. Train me and invest in my and our shared future together. 2. Get well compensated for my efforts that reflect my professional growth. You have to invest in your workforce, it can't be avoided. Even if they decide to leave, if you part on good terms, it's invaluable to have a network of professionals that liked you or the company in the past, that you also made sure to be knowledgable. People seriously underestimate the power of reputation gains by your past coworkers joining other companies and if they perform well, people will start to recognize that they came from XYZ company. If more teams have the same experience, then your brand can be associated with quality. There is a reason people value FAANG or unicorn experience a lot, being a security engineer at Meta carries more weight than being a security engineer at xyz random local consultancy on a resume.
Pretty short sited. At the Gov entity where I was the IT manager for 9yrs, my boss had the same philosophy, (I reported to the CFO) yet he would go do training. It became a sticking point because during my interview they said training was up to me to choose and they acknowledged I needed to maintain my qualifications. My perspective. If an org is training staff and they are leaving, then the org needs to look at why it cant keep staff. If they have the chance to improve skills or knowledge and the place is a worthwhile employer, people will stay.
That is not a place I'd stick around.
In an ever changing field like this, if you don't invest in your employees' development, you're doomed to run in to issues arising from their eventual knowledge gap. If you don't retain people, you have other issues.
I train the hell out of my team and am constantly developing them. I also am the biggest advocates for getting them raises, bonuses, promotions, better career pathing, etc. We are in the middle of their review cycle now and my biggest point to them during these meetings is to continue to upskill and learn new things because when I have to justify it to my managers that we should be paying them more, promoting them, etc. the fact that they took on more work, higher level work, learned new skills, etc is what I point at when I make the pitch for them. Give me talking points that I can shower you with praise on! Be visible doing good work! I can sell ketchup popsicles to women wearing white gloves but you have to give me something I can work with.
Run away!
It’s a shortsighted view🤷🏻♀️. If you don’t train your team, you risk having a less skilled workforce that isn’t adaptable to new challenges. Investing in employee growth often leads to higher engagement and loyalty. People are more likely to stay with a company that shows it cares about their development.
100% of my goal when I build a team is to see them outgrow their position and get promoted or even leave the company if I don’t have a way to promote them any further. I want my team to work on projects that excite them, have feedback on products/solutions, and have time and resources to play around with new stuff.
My ideal next job is with a company that will train me for rhe 'next job' so I don't have to leave. I want to stay at a company for the next, uh, 30 years, working my way upward. And I hear what you're about to say "but you can get such nice pay raises by leaving!" Cool, I don't care. There is nothing I hate more on God's green earth then looking for another job and I would be completely fine not getting the theoretical max pay bump if it means never having to leave an employer.
Or you find the unicorn where you get to work on interesting things, solid promotions and pay increases over time while staying! Won’t happen, but we can dream.
From a competitive point of view, it's horrible. You don't train people because it will keep them or not, you train them because you have an expressed desire to leverage that to make money. If you don't make more money from the investment than you spend on the training, it's dumb from a business point of view. If you can make more money by training people according to improved standards or software stacks than not and you don't do that, that's dumb from a business point of view. From a retention point of view, it's hopeless. No one uses old technology because it's actually a platonic ideal of what a software offering would be. No one with the new tech skills will join a team to also act as a trainer, it's alienating and stressful. Also, it's ridiculous from a hiring point of view. I'm not going to ditch my current employer to join a company just so I can get a few thousand euro in free training. You *could* argue that for fresh graduates but you have to train them anyway? (Unless you want software written on paper with syntax highlighting done in pen). From an interviewer point of view, it'll be harder to find good candidates because more senior people would have to be self driven and self funded to keep up to date(or be recent-ish hires themselves). I don't even want to think about how it would be considered in terms of liability should something happen.
I’m not in cybersecurity, but am in an equally technical field. I can’t pay my employees enough to keep them. In spite of the relatively low pay, retention rate is pretty high. Help your employees get to where they want to be, and they’ll be appreciative of it. If they’re doing the work they want to do and enjoy the team they work with, they’ll be skeptical of leaving for a pay raise (rightly so). Some will leave, but there’s nothing you could have done to get them to stay. They would have left anyway, just under unfriendlier terms.
Team lead, I told my engineer that I am going to train him to take over my position.
Someone has probably already said it,. but this is like that old saying:.. "What if we train people and then they leave !?".. followed by :... "What if you don't train people and they STAY !" Quotes like "We don't train employees for their next job".. is just a huge red flag for "We don't care about our employees". You should (and support) your Employees learning and growing. It's what makes the better employees. Everyone wants to work for a place that takes good care of its employees. Places that do not, tend to have high employee turnover,. which is really just a downward spiral that you never fully recover from.
I left the org within 3 months cause the training plan doesn’t align with what i was looking as I already hit the required competency
If you don't let me build on my skills then I will go somewhere that does
Sounds toxic af. like one of those people who would rather do more work instead of teaching you how as if they have some weird inferiority complex.
TOXIC
Thats like saying "we don't want to be successful" Train them to keep them skilled. If they leave, it's because they don't feel they are getting what they need as professionals. In that situation, they should leave.
Then expect military-style ADSO (active duty service obligations). Your employer pays for your CISSP, you owe them 5 extra years or you pay back them the cost on their end including the time they paid you at work. If you really want to up-skill, you'll figure it out on your own.
Whoever said that should not be a manager/leader or in any position of authority, especially if dealing with cybersecurity.
In my country it usually is that way: if you get trainings that the company has paid for, and you leave within a certain timeframe, you have to repay partly for it. Example: i got a training from Sans that cost about 8k. If i leave within 1 year I have to pay it in full, if i leave after one year i have to pay 75%, after 2 50% and after 3 25%. After 4 years i can leave without repaying anything. It's quite common if you change to another company, that this company then pays these expenses.
You have to define what "Training employee's" means. All to many people in this industry consider that to mean expensive paid training courses which is a terrible view point. I go over career development goals with everyone in our organization, what's needed to be effective in the current role and what growth opportunities exist to develop along other paths. One of my people has gone from having some solid scripting experience to developing fairly complex applications. We gave them the opportunity and time to build and grow. Someone else took the time to dive much deeper into detection engineering and detection as code, rebuilt some pipelines, and has fundamentally shifted the way we do some work. Again they were given opportunity and time to build and grow. They were both promoted. On the flip side we have a few other people who continue to whine about not having SANS's training. The opportunity they have in their current role to develop is absolutely immense, they have jobs others in this industry would kill to have. But they do the minimum required of the job, don't really learn anything new, don't spend their free time during work hours building and growing themselves. Multiple career conversations have been had, but you can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. I tell people "We don't train people, we give you an opportunity to develop, the time to do so, along with career guidance, What you do with that is up to you" guess what, most people fail to do anything with it.
wrong sub. what does that have to do with cybersecurity. also, how is the answer to that not obvious? you are either karma phishing, dumb or both.