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Increasingly, training professionals are being asked to justify whether training is a worthwhile investment. Discusses the need to justify training expenditures with documented benefits. Provides details, along with examples, on how to calculate the direct, indirect, and full costs of a training course or programme. Also describes the feasibility of linking training outcomes to organizational improvements and the selection of training outcomes (benefits) to be measured and quantified.

Discusses the methodological issues in costing two common types of vocational training programmes: institutional vocational training and enterprise‐based vocational training. Points out that the survey/interview approach should be used to collect data from institutions instead of from the government in costing institutional vocational training, and that more frequent use should be made of the case‐study and survey methods in costing enterprise‐based vocational training. Based on empirical studies on both developed and developing countries, analyses the costs of different types of vocational training programmes. Shows that training costs are influenced by such factors as the technology of training, teacher costs and their determinants, programme length, extent of wastage, extent of underutilization of training inputs and scale of operation. In general, vocational/technical education is more costly than academic programmes and pre‐employment vocational training is more expensive than in‐service training. Discusses the implications of these findings for training policies.

The purpose of this paper is to compare a firm’s net cost and post-apprenticeship benefits of providing apprenticeship training in Austria and Switzerland: two countries with many similarities but some critical institutional differences.

The authors draw on detailed workplace data with information on the costs and benefits of apprenticeship training, as well as on hiring costs for skilled workers from the external labour market. The authors use nearest-neighbour matching models to compare Austrian firms with similar Swiss firms based on observable characteristics.

On average, a Swiss firm generates an annual net benefit of €3,400 from training an apprentice, whereas a firm in Austria incurs net costs of €4,200. The impetus for this difference is largely a higher relative apprentice pay in Austria. However, compared with Swiss firms, Austrian firms generate a higher post-training return by retaining a higher share of apprentices and savings on future hiring costs.

The authors demonstrate that apprenticeship systems can exist under different institutional environments. For countries currently in the process of establishing or expanding apprenticeship systems, the comparative analysis clearly shows that policymakers should consider more than just one country’s particular apprenticeship model.

The authors provide a first comparative analysis between two apprenticeship countries that empirically assesses a firm’s costs and benefits of training during an apprenticeship programme and also provides a monetary value of a particular type of post-training benefits that firms can generate by retaining former apprentices as skilled workers (i.e. savings in future hiring costs for skilled workers).

The purpose of this paper is to simulate the potential costs and benefits for Spanish firms providing dual apprenticeship training.

The paper conducts simulations of ten training occupations in six different industries in Spain. For these simulations, the authors combined Spanish wage data and the existing training curriculum regarding instruction times in vocational school in Spain with data from Swiss firms offering training in similar occupations. These data contain information regarding the amount of workplace training, relative apprentice productivity, and the relative importance of non-wage training costs (such as training equipment).

The authors found that training occupation, training scenario, and firm size are important determinants of the authors’ simulations for the expected net costs of apprenticeship training in Spanish firms. Consequently, the break-even level of apprentices’ wages differs significantly by training occupation and training scenario, suggesting that one prescribed apprentice wage for all sectors and occupations would be detrimental to the willingness of many firms to provide training places.

Dual apprenticeship training may improve the labor market transition for Spanish youth. The paper provides guidelines for regulatory frameworks that allow firms to provide apprenticeship training without having to bear net training costs – an important condition given that apprentices are free to leave the training firm upon graduation.

The authors’ simulations show that Spanish firms would be able to provide high-quality apprenticeship training programs that would also appeal to more talented youth because of the combination of a decent earning opportunity during the apprenticeship and good future career options.

This paper provides novel and direct empirical evidence regarding the framework conditions within the Spanish apprenticeship system, thus incentivizing both firms and individuals to participate in dual apprenticeship training programs.

To evaluate past and recent research on the costs of training human resources in Australia and to compare the merits of different research methods used to measure these costs. The discussion is situated in a general context of low employer contribution to training provision in Australia and acute policy debates on public training provision.

The article presents the aggregate results of two recent quantitative surveys of training costs in Australian organizations. Both surveys adopt an economic definition of the costs and concentrate on firm‐specific skills acquired up until new recruits reach average productivity.

Survey results suggest that the informal costs of training human resources outstrip direct training expenditure and average training costs are much larger than commonly assumed in the policy debate in Australia.

Ideally, the surveys reported upon should be extended to include continuing training costs and a measure of the degree of employer‐provided general training.

Official surveys largely underestimate the cost of employer‐provided training in Australia, contributing to (mistaken?) perceptions of private sector disengagement. Existing measures of the costs should adopt a more comprehensive approach, including the use of economic concepts.

This research stresses, both to HR practitioners and policy makers, the value of measuring opportunity costs in training processes, and contributes to its quantification.

To judge from the literature there has been a substantial amount of research carried out into the evolution of supervisor training. For the most part, however, this work has been carried out by those with psychological/sociological leanings; in fact it should more appropriately be described as “validation”, in that no attempt has been made to value the effects of the training programmes in either resource or cash terms. Thus most of the research has been concerned primarily with the factors that affect the learning process and the transfer of learning. To a large extent, therefore, economic evaluations of training have been ignored. No doubt this reflects the fact that such training is difficult to evaluate economically.

Much has been written about the causes and measurement of labour turnover, but less has been written about the costs involved. It is generally assumed that high rates of labour turnover will have harmful financial effects, without any serious attempt being made to quantify these effects. Sometimes it is considered that the costs involved in quantifying the costs will not justify the knowledge gained. Over the years, however, various methods for costing labour turnover have been suggested and used in specific examples. This article summarises the main methods suggested, and attempts to draw some conclusions as to their adequacy. No method yet devised has presented management with a simple but effective guide to labour turnover costs which can be applied in most situations.

Relatively little attempt has so far been made to assess the cost of training in retail organisations. But it is essential that an attempt be made to assess training as an investment, and to control the function so that the best possible return is obtained from it. Stephen Hart has devised a scheme which enables a complete statement of training costs to be made and which permits real comparisons between training in different departments.

The aim of this research is to investigate and detect determinants of the training practice and conspicuous differences in the sample of nine Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania). The study was conducted with three distinct objectives: the investigation of the training and development (T&D) practices in the CEE region, the investigation of the determinants of T&D practices in the CEE region and the measurement of the differences between the economies in the sample of CEE countries regarding their T&D practices.

The research is based on the Cranet research network results from 2015 to 2016. The data for the CEE countries were selected in order to investigate the determinants of T&D practice, and the differences between these economies. The nine CEE countries were divided into two groups, on the basis on the variety of capitalism (VoC approach), in order to investigate its effects on the T&D practices. T-test, chi-square test, Spearman correlation tests and hierarchical moderated regression model were used to test the proposed hypotheses.

There are statistically significant differences between the organizations from coordinated market economy (CME) countries and liberal market economy (LME) countries in the case of the percentage of GDP of the country spent on education, the percentage of annual payroll costs of the organizations spent on training, the percentage of annual staff turnover, the implementation of the systematic evaluation of training needs, the training effectiveness, the existence of T&D strategy and the primary responsibility for major policy decisions on T&D. The results of the regression model showed that the majority of national and organizational level factors have a statistically significant relationship with the percentage of the annual payroll costs of the organization spent on training. Variety of capitalism moderates the relationship between independent variables and the dependent variable, too.

In the presented model, the authors excluded from their investigation the effects of MNCs. It must further be stated that only the data from the latest Cranet research round were used, thus it was not possible to investigate the development of the training practice in CEE over a longer time period. These limitations could be used as possible directions for further research in the relevant area of HRM in the CEE region.

Since there is relatively little empirical research in the relation between capitalism type and T&D practice, especially in the region of CEE, the present paper lends new insight into this issue as well as into comparative HRM. It is hoped that this work can be taken as a starting point for further research.